Clara's cookies (aka nutella filled cookies)

Clara, a good friend of mine from Spain, told me last time we met that she had tried this recipe (spanish only) but that she had swapped the chocolate chip cookies with nutella, and the results were amazing. She also told me that she had changed the method a bit to fill the cookies with the nutella instead of making a swirl or coating them with it. My cookies were not as good looking as hers but they were amazing too ^^ The trick appears to be to be generous with the nutella ;-)

This recipe yielded 16 cookies as they taste better if they're not too big.

Clara's cookies:

Ingredients:

100g brown sugar
40g white sugar
110g unsalted butter at room temperature
230g plain flour
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
Nutella at room temperature

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
2. Beat together the sugars with the softened butter till well mixed. Add the egg and the vanilla and beat again until you have an homogeneus paste.
3. In another bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt.
4. Slowly add the flour to the butter mixture until well combined.
5. Wrap the dough with cling film and let it chill in the fridge for at least one hour.
6. Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it till it's around 5mm thick. With a cookie cutter, or something similar, cut round shapes from it. Gather the scraps of dough together, roll it again and cut additional cookies out.
7. Fill the cut out cookies with a teaspoon of nutella each and close them over it.
8. Bake in the preheated oven for 8-12 minutes till they are light brown (be careful not to overbake them).
9. Remove he cookies from the pan and let them cool on a wire rack before storing them in an air tight container.

Chocolate chip yogurt cupcakes

(Sorry for the quality of the photo, I couldn't find my camera and had to take it with my phone).
Last year I discovered The Great British Bake Off thanks to a coworker and I've been looking forward to this year's edition ever since I finished watching all the seasons I missed. Now, every Wednesday, you can see me drooling in front of my TV and also eating something sweet to cope with all the longing for cakes and tarts and pies and...well, everything baked, that I get after watching all those gorgeous creations made by amateur bakers (not that I'm surprised that somebody can be so good without being a pro after following dailydelicious for so many years). In this state of mind I decided yesterday to bake some cupcakes so that I had something to go with the program ^^ The chosen ones were these cupcakes from Happy Flour basically because I already had all the ingredients except for the chocolate rice, that I substituted with milk chocolate chips.

This recipe yielded 8 cupcakes but between my boyfriend and I none were left this morning ^^U The cupcakes were really tasty and we specially liked the way the yogurt flavour mixed with the chocolate.

Chocolate chip yogurt cupcakes:

Ingredients:

60g white sugar
40g unsalted butter
110g all purpose flour
110g plain yogurt
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
60g milk chocolate chips

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 175ºC.
2. Sift flour, baking soda and baking powder together and set aside.
3. In another bowl, cream butter, salt and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Slowly beat into the butter mixture the egg and the vanilla essence until well combined.
5. Fold in flour and yogurt alternately until well combined.
6. Finally add the chocolate chips.
7. Line a muffin tin with paper casing and spoon batter into it until 70% full.
8. Bake in the preheated oven for 25-30 minutes or until golden.
9. Remove he cupcakes from the tin and let them cool on a wire rack.

Pear cake

Now, when the Christmas holidays are over and I'm stuffed with Christmas sweets, it's the time to think about eating healthy and slim down all the weight gained thanks to my mom's delicious cooking :-) But I still want to bake and eat cakes! That's why I chose to make this delicious fruity cake which relies on the natural sweetness of pears rather than using lots of sugar. This cake is moist, fragant and guilt-free (not that I ever feel guilty for eating anything delicious but...).

The recipe is an adaptation of this one. Basically, I skipped the lemon juice and the liquor and added some almond extract.

Ingredients:

30g white sugar
55g unsalted butter
75g all purpose flour
500g pears (gross weight)
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
2. Melt the butter. Leave aside to cool a bit.
3. In another bowl, mix together the flour and the baking powder and then add the sugar.
4. Mix the butter and the eggs and then add the flour little by little to the butter, mixing well between additions.
5. Peel, core and dice the pears. Add them to the butter and flour mixture.
6. Pour the mixture into a non-stick muffin pan and bake in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes or until golden (I made mine very thin to get more of them so they only stayed in the oven for 12 minutes).

Turrón chip cookies

And again another recipe with turrón ^w^ This time I used a basic recipe for chocolate chip cookies and replaced the vanilla extract with almond extract and the chocolate chips with turrón chips.
I made these cookies for a charity baking sale and they had a good acceptance :-) People said that they tasted kind of like marzipan, I guess that's because of the almond extract...

Ingredients (for around 30 cookies):

200g white sugar
100g unsalted butter
150g soft turrón (Spanish almond nougat)
220g flour
1 egg
3/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Method:

1. Cream together butter, sugar and salt.
2. Beat the egg and then add it to the butter. Then add the almond extract and beat until well mixed.
3. In another bowl, mix together the flour and the baking powder.
4. Add the flour little by little to the butter, mixing well between additions.
5. Chop the nougat and add it to the dough (similar to when you add chocolate chips).
6. Allow the dough to rest for at least 15 minutes in the fridge. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 170ºC.
7. Line the baking tray with kitchen foil/waxed paper/silicon matt (whatever you prefer, just make sure that the cookies won't stick later). Take the dough out of the fridge and make little balls with it. Put them on the tray about 4cm (2 inch) away because they will grow thanks to the baking powder.
8. Bake them for 12-15 minutes or until golden.
9. Allow them to cool in a wire rack. When they're cold store them in an airtight container.

Turrón cheesecake

Another recipe of my invention! This is the second one after the honey and walnut biscotti and is basically a twist on the traditional NY Cheesecake. My recipe substitutes half of the cream cheese with the spanish soft almond nougat and changes the kind of sugar used to muscovado. Also, I refrained from using vanilla essence because I didn't thought that it would suit the flavour of the turrón.

I got this recipe right on my first attempt (incredible, I know!) though it makes a rich and heavy cake so it's advisable to either eat only a small portion each time or use half of the ammounts (quite difficult when it comes to the eggs but I used 3 medium sized eggs so you could try with 2 small sized ones).

Ingredients:

200g digestive cookies
175g muscovado sugar
75g unsalted butter (melted)
300g cream cheese
300g almond nougat (turrón) from Jijona
200ml soured cream
50g flour
3 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
50g milk chocolate (to decorate)

Method:

1. To make the base, crush the digestive cookies with a food processor until they're fine crumbs, or put them in a sealed plastic food bag and crush them with a rolling pin.
2. Add 25 grams of the sugar, the salt and the melted butter. Mix well and press it into the base of a 20cm loose-bottomed cake tin. Chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
3. In a bowl, mix the cream cheese, remaining sugar, almond nougat (cut in small pieces) and soured cream until smooth.
4. Add the eggs one by one, ensuring that each of them is well mixed before adding the next one..
5. Fold the flour into the mixture to form a smooth batter.
6. Preheat the oven to 180ºC. Take the cake tin out of the fridge and spoon the filling over the cooled base.
7. Bake the cheesecake for 45-60 minutes until it's set at the edges and just wobbly in the middle. If the cake is getting too brown in the top cover it with foil.
8. Leave the cake to cool completely in the tin and then unmold it and store in the fridge for at least three hours.
9. Melt the chocolate over a water bath (or in the microwave, but veeeery carefully) and spread it over the cooled cake. Leave the cake in the fridge for another 15 minutes or till the chocolate hardens.

Meringue cake: Pavlova down-under style

I made this cake last summer but I completely forgot about it until today, and I only remembered because I saw the photographs while preparing another post (that now I´m going to delay till next week ^_^U)

The recipe comes from Audax Artifex's blog and I've had it in my bookmarks ever since the post was published. The cake was as soft and cotton like as I was hopping it would be and the fresh fruits (kiwi and banana in my case) add a nice touch to it though it could have been better without the wipped cream. Because the original post is waaay more complete than anything I could make (especially cause I've forgotten the amounts in grams that I used) I won't repeat the recipe here but encourage you to check the original one. The only thing that I can add is that it's delicious and makes a great summer dessert ^w^

Spanish almond nougat cookies

It's traditional in Spain to eat turrón in Christmas. The typical turrón can be of two varieties: Alicante or Jijona, being the Alicante type the hard kind and the Jijona the soft and chewy kind. The name of turrón can be translated to English as almond nougat, which is especially accurate for the Alicante variety, though I have used the Jijona variety for my cookies. The one I've used comes from last Christmas' leftovers which my boyfriend brought to UK on January ^·^U I don't like that type and my boyfriend seemed to have forgotten about its existence so I decided to turn it into delicious cookies. And delicious they are, indeed! My boyfriend devoured them and said they were the best ones I've made so far! ^o^

I found the recipe in this blog but it's in Spanish and I changed one or two things so I'm posting the new recipe below, enjoy!

Ingredients:

100g butter at room temperature
70g sugar
300g almond nougat (turrón) from Jijona
300g flour
1 egg

Method:

1. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
2. In another bowl, mix together the nougat and the egg to form a paste. It can be done either by hand with a fork or with an electric mixer.
3. Mix together the butter and the nougat until well combined.
4. Add the flour to the mixture to form a soft dough. Split in two and wrap each dough with cling film. Allow to set in the fridge for at least two hours.
5. Preheat the oven to 175ºC. Prepare the baking trays with a non-stick surface (baking paper).
6. Shape one of the doughs into a cilinder and store it in the freezer while you shape the other dough. Store the second dough in the freezer while you cut the first dough into slices of about 5mm thick and line them in the baking tray. Repeat the process with the second dough.
7. Bake the cookies for 12-15 minutes or until they begin to brown. Switch off the oven and let them rest inside of it for another 3-4 minutes.
8. Take the cookies out of the oven and let them cool before storing them in an airthight container. The cookies will taste better and their texture will improve after one day, so try to be patient! (though it's difficult ^^).