Mia Bakes: HappyCall Crisp Chocolate Chip Cookies (cookies cooked on hob!)

Well, I didn't intend to put this up as a recipe post, but in the end I just decided to (for my own record's sake) so here's a super quick and short post! 

To be honest, I have no idea how many cookies I can get out of this recipe because I've not finished baking the entire batch of dough (more than half of it is currently still frozen in my freezer) even after using part of it as my baked cheesecake base. That idea came out pretty fail, by the way, because the low heat required to bake off the cheesecake is not enough to give you a crunchy cookie base, which was what I want to achieve. But if you like a soft, severely underbaked, chewy and gooey cookie base, then go for it. 

Anyway, to get at least an estimated a dozen huge (subway sized) chocolate chip cookies, you'll need:

100g unsalted butter

70g shortening (preferably butter-flavoured)

75g dark brown sugar

115g castor sugar 

(I substituted part of this with stevia)

125g plain flour

60g top flour (or cake flour)

1 large egg

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

180g chocolate chips 

(I used semi-sweet & 72% dark mixed)

recipe adapted from modernhoney.com

First up, melt your unsalted butter in a pot over the hob and let it simmer until browned. Then, take it off the heat and set it aside to cool, before beating in the shortening and sugars until creamy.

Add in the egg (at room temperature) and vanilla extract, and mixed until well combined before sifting in the the rest of the dry ingredients (except chocolate chips) in 2 to 3 batches, folding until most of the flour cannot be seen. 

Then, add in your chocolate chips (or you can use chocolate chunks, up to you) and fold until just combined. 

And I'm pretty sure nobody needs to bake off a dozen huge-ass chocolate chip cookies at one shot, unless you're having a party, so just portion out the amount of dough you wish to bake off for now, and wrap the rest tightly in clingwrap and pop it into the freezer. That should give you ready-made chocolate chip cookie dough for the next couple of weeks!

Do note that cooking time will differ depending on how big or small you portion out your cookies to be, I made mine with 3 flat tablespoonfuls of dough each. 

The cookie dough has a pretty high fat content (170g of butter and shortening!) and also because HappyCall is a non-stick pan, there's really no need for you to add in anymore butter or cooking spray. Just warm up your pan for a little (needs not be very hot, just barely warm), and then press your cookie dough (I shaped mine into about slightly more than 0.5cm thick) onto the pan. Snap your HappyCall pan shut and lower your heat down to the lowest heat and cook for about 8 to 10 minutes, or until the side has turned golden brown.

Now, the reason why I used HappyCall pan is because the cookies will still be very soft and crumbly, so flipping them will be a b*tch! With HappyCall, you simply just flip your entire pan around and set it back onto the hob! It's that easy!

Cook your cookies for another 8 mins or so, until the side turns golden brown as well. 

At this point, the cookies will be fully baked (this is a slightly crunchy, crisp cookie so you need not worry about over-baking it that much) but they will still very extremely fragile. Leave it on the pan to cool for at least 3 to 5 minutes before attempting to pick it up. The cookies will firm up and turn crisp upon cooling down. 

Till then, 

Mia Foo

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Mia Bakes: Salted Caramel Chip Wholemeal Chocolate Cookies

Now, that sounds like a mouthful isn't it? HAHAHA.

Well, I was looking at my leftover bag of salted caramel chips after baking the Chocolate Lava Salted Caramel Chip Cookie and thought, what else can I make out of this? 

Well, actually you can make anything with salted caramel chips, really. But I was still craving for some half soft-half crunchy cookie, so well... let's go!

To make 12-14 cookies, you'll need:

50g soften unsalted butter

25g baking stevia 

(or castor sugar, if you fancy)

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tbsp raw honey

1/2 egg 

(to get half an egg, beat your egg and measure out half of the weight)

10g unsweetened cocoa powder

90g wholemeal flour

(you can use plain flour if you prefer)

1/4 tsp baking soda

a pinch of salt

(or use salted butter and omit salt)

50g salted caramel chips

optional:

dark chocolate chunks

colourful sprinkles

-recipe adapted from geniuskitchen.com-

This really CANNOT be any easier. 

First up, cream your butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, before beating in the egg, honey and vanilla extract. 

Sift in your dry ingredients (do not skip sifting as cocoa powder is always lumpy) and fold until most of the pockets of flour has disappeared, before folding in the salted caramel chips until just combined. 

Drop tablespoonful of your cookie batter onto a baking sheet lined with baking paper, space them about an inch apart. They do spread a bit, but not that much, so do press them down a little with wet hands if you prefer a flatter cookie. 

If you fancy, press in a few chunks of dark chocolate (or any chocolate you like) over the top of the flatten cookie and sprinkle some colourful sprinkles over the top before sending these cookies into the oven at 180 degree Celsius and bake them for about 15 to 18 minutes. 

 And, tadaa~

The sprinkles definitely added a nice, joyous touch to these cookies, which is slightly cakey and right smack in between a crunchy cookie and a soft cookie. YUMS!

Till then,

Mia Foo

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Mia Bakes: Gluten-Free Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Nope, I'm not planning to go on a gluten-free diet because there's tons of ill-informed "weight loss tips" floating out there saying it helps with losing weight. 

IT DOESN'T! 

Gluten is not evil, you absolutely do not need to cut it out unless you're gluten-intolerant or have celiac disease. 

So the reason why I tweaked out this gluten-free recipe based off allrecipes (using quick-cook oats) is because I found a 3/4 full bag of sweet potato flour sitting in the cabinet, and have no idea how it got itself there and how else am I supposed to be using it for. A quick google search tells me it can be used as a replacement for normal wheat flour, and so I thought, alright here it goes!

So let's get over the ingredients so we can get started!

For a batch of roughly 21 to 24 small cookies, you'll need:

115g unsalted butter, soften

60g muscovado sugar

(or light brown sugar)

60g sugarless sugar blend 

(or castor sugar)

80g sweet potato flour

180g quick-cook oats

(180g was all I have left, and it worked!)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

100g semi-sweet chocolate chips

First up, cream the butter and sugars until the butter gets "fluffed up" before whisking in the egg and vanilla extract. Add in all the dry ingredients and fold until almost fully combined and then fold in the chocolate chips until just combined. 

Drop tablespoonfuls of the batter onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and give each of them a firm press to flatten them down as they will not spread much during baking. 

Send them into an oven pre-heated to 190 degree Celsius for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until the cookies turn slightly golden brown (if you prefer your oatmeal cookies crisp/crunchy like me). 

 And tadaa~

These cookies are crunchy and slightly crisp at the edges, not too sweet, and gluten-free!

Per serving of 1 cookie has 86 kcals with 11.2g carbs, 4.7g fats and 0.9g protein. 

Till then,

Mia Foo

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Mia Bakes: Choco-Matcha Ban Ban Soft Cookies

And so the baking trio met again for another day of therapeutic baking! And if you haven't seen our re-creation of Maangchi's gyeran ppang (korean egg bread) recipe, be sure to check it out HERE.

And of course, the three of us wouldn't be satisfied with just barely 30 minutes of baking for the day, hence here's our 2nd bake. Ban ban (half & half) cookies! This is something like the currently trending brookies (brownie + cookies), but more flexible with the flavours. 

For our first try at the ban ban cookie, we've decided to follow another Korean youtube baking guru, Honeykki's recipe. 

You'll need:

For the green tea dough:

150g cake flour

15g green tea powder

100g castor sugar

100g salted butter

(add 2g salt if you're using unsalted)

3g baking powder

1 egg

a dash of vanilla extract

50g white chocolate chips

For the chocolate dough:

150g cake flour

15g unsweeten cocoa powder

100g castor sugar

100g salted butter

(add 2g salt if you're using unsalted)

3g baking powder

1 egg

a dash of vanilla extract

50g semi-sweet chocolate chips

Prepare both doughs separately in two large bowls. First, cream your butter and sugar until the mixture turns pale and fluffy, before beating in the egg & vanilla extract until well combined. Then, sift in your dry ingredients and fold until just combined before adding in the chocolate chips and folding lightly to mix it evenly.

Drop about 1/2 tbsp of each dough (together) on a baking sheet, spread about 1 inch apart. Using wet or greased hands (the dough will be sticky!), mold the two flavours together (but do not mix them up, just press them together into 1 cookie) and press it down lightly to flatten. Top up the flatten dough with more chocolate chips if desired before baking at 160 degree Celsius for about 13 minutes. 

The baking temperature and baking time will depends greatly on your oven and its setting, hence do start with lower temperatures and keep a watchful eye on your cookie while they bake. You DO NOT want your cookie to brown. 

TADAA~!

These are soft cookies with a cakey texture, not really my kind of cookie as I prefer mine crunchy, but being both a green tea fan and a huge chocolate fan, this was right up my alley!

But I might want to tweak the recipe a little next time to get crunchy cookies, and also try out the combination of peanut butter with chocolate instead. Green tea with Chocolate tasted a little bit... not that much in sync. 

CL suggested of using a flavour that makes red cookies (red velvet or strawberry?) in place of the green tea next time so we can get ladybug cookies!

How cute would that be!

Till then,

Mia Foo

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Mia Bakes: Homemade Digestive Biscuits (Wholewheat Oatmeal Honey Biscuits)

If you didn't know, I've started on a diet-changing mission almost 3 weeks back and I'm currently on my 3rd week of zero refined sugar, zero refined carbohydrates diet. 

But, I can't give up on my wheat products and it's kind of depressing whenever I see sugar listed among the top 3 in the ingredient list of those biscuits I loved, or they do not use 100% wholegrain flour. 

So I thought, heck it! I'm going to bake my own healthy, no refined sugar, 100% wholegrain biscuits! 

And I'm not going to lie that I'm super happy to find out that they taste really close to those store-bought digestive biscuits, just not as crumbly-crisp and of course, not as sweet. 

So, let's get over the ingredients so we can get started.

You'll need:

100g Wholewheat AP Flour

100g rolled oats

(I used quick-cooking oats)

100g Salted Butter, soften

2 tsp Baking Powder

2 to 2.5 tbps raw Honey

If you prefer to use brown sugar instead of honey, you'll probably need more depending on how sweet you like your biscuits to be and also some milk to form your dough,

First up, blitz your oatmeal in your food processor until it resembles flour. Then, add in your wholewheat flour and baking powder and whisk to combine. 

Using clean hands, knead in your soften butter until the mixture starts to get clumpy and resembles wet sand. 

Finally, knead in your honey until your mixture forms a dough ball. 

I suggest that you start with 2 tbps of honey first and only add in more if your dough is still dry. If you wish to have less sweet version, you can reduce your honey and add in milk for the required hydration level of your dough too. 

Wrap your dough ball with clingwrap and leave in the fridge for at least 1 to 2 hours for it to set, so that it's easier to roll out and cut out your biscuits.

I rolled mine pretty thinly, about slightly less than 1 cm thick and cut our some cute bunnies and lambs with my small cookie-cutter.

Send your biscuits into your oven, preheated to 180 degree Celsius and bake for 15 minutes until you can smell the buttery fragrance coming out from your biscuits. They do not spread at all, so you may lay them as close as possible on your baking sheet. 

Tadaa, my cute bunnies and lambs.

A friend asked if those bunnies are Ewok, though. =.="

I halved the recipe and got 15 of these small sized biscuits, which are so yummy!

And of course, if butter is still not healthy enough for you, feel free to switch it with another oil of your choice, like coconut oil or EVOO for an even more guilt-free sweet treat!

To get the wholegrain flour and organic raw honey I've used for this recipe, hop over to iHerb right now! 

Till then,

Mia Foo

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