“What do you get when you guzzle down sweets?”

“Eating as much as an elephant eats?”

In my quest to bake everything from Mary Berry’s Baking Bible, I made double chocolate cookies recently - my god what a disgustingly huge amount of condensed milk. Personally I prefer to have a smaller quantity of condensed milk in the recipe (so I can eat spoonfuls of it later on. Sigh…).

I was worried the dough was too warm to add the white chocolate buttons to so I chilled my dough before adding them in. Big mistake. The dough became very stiff and didn’t mix well with the buttons. Luckily it was okay forming them into  little balls as I could manually manipulate the dough around the buttons.

A point for future bakes – cover the dough when chilling. Mine formed a sort of skin which changed the texture of the finished bake a bit. Also push down the cookie-balls on the baking sheet before baking as they didn’t flatten as much in the oven as I thought they would. Also, use smaller chocolate chips than buttons (even though that’s what’s used in the photo in the book) as you wind up with fewer than two buttons per cookie. Alternatively, I could use more than the specified weight of buttons…Hmm...much prefer that solution!

Anyway, after making a batch of 36 double chocolate cookies I was all chocolated-out for this week. I don’t know how 36 seemed to be way too many considering the eating habits of CB and myself, but I was glad to see the back of them by the end of the weekend.

So this week I decided to go savoury. I made cheese straws on Sunday (perfectly fine, but nothing to write home about) and a cheese and celery crown loaf on Monday. I was amazed that with no yeast and therefore no proving I still ended up with a risen and bread-like texture. The celery tasted slightly too salty for my tastes (something to watch for in future bakes of this recipe) and not cheesy enough despite an artery-clogging quantity added to the dough and sprinkled on top. Perhaps it wasn’t strong enough cheddar?

I’m hoping to use the rest of the cheese up in a cheese scone round, but then I worry I’ll be all cheesed-out following my over-chocolated week. Plus I should probably start to worry about my increasing waistline…


*Quote from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory