A JARFUL OF HAPPINESS
April 13, 2015
To celebrate our new Nicholas Mosse cookie jar and to welcome ‘home’ the family, I found this recipe we used many years ago for our café. It’s so good we just might have to start using it again! It’s a version of a basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, but we added nuts and used more brown sugar than usual. Our cookie jar is large and I was hoping to fill it to the brim with these little treats. This recipe will produce a full jar worth of treats, as well as a good plateful for ‘testing’ right away.
Ingredients:
- 2.5 cups of self-raising flour (12 oz)
- A pinch of salt
- ½ lb unsalted butter
- 1 cup dark brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 12 measured ounces of chopped chocolate (8 oz weighed or 2 x 4 oz bars of super quality chocolate)
- ¾ cup nuts, roughly chopped
How to Prepare:
Preheat the oven to 165°C (330 °F) and lightly grease as many cookie tins as you can put in your oven comfortably.
Most cookie recipes follow the same rules: cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, then add eggs and keep beating. I use a food processor but a mixer is just as good. Take this sugar/butter batch and add to the sifted flour in a large bowl. Carefully stir together. The less you handle the dough when the flour is added, the more tender the result, so be careful not to overdo it. Add your chocolate and nuts as soon as the batter is consistently mixed, again taking care not to over beat.
You can now make little cookies or great big ones, whichever you desire! This recipe works well in a variety of sizes. I used a teaspoon to drop blobs onto a baking sheet, leaving 2 inches between cookies. If you’re trying for super large cookies, it’s a good idea to press lightly on your dough ball with wet hands to get a good, evenly cooked shape.
Bake for 12 minutes. Cool thoroughly on a rack and then enjoy filling that jar. Yum!
