Tags
chocolate chunks, cranberries, dried cranberries, drizzle and dip, macadamia nuts, Samantha Linsell, white chocolate
Grab me quickly
Yes you can….
I love the kind of cookbooks you just can’t put down until you’ve identified at least 5 things you want to cook then and there and that was the case with one of my fave South African cooks, Samatha Linsell, whose first book, Drizzle and Dip, was published in 2012. She also runs a very visually stimulating blog, with the same name.
200g good quality white chocolate
100g unsalted butter (soft)
1 large free-range organic egg
120g caster sugar
180g plain flour
1 heaped tea spoon of baking powder
50g dried cranberries
50g macadamia nuts
1 dessert spoon redberry love spice (more about this later)
Before you start, I suggest you chop up your dried cranberries, white chocolate and macadamia nuts using a very sharp knife or pulsing them in a food processor (if using this, be careful that it doesn’t go into tiny bits).
Prepare your baking tray by lining it with baking paper.
1. Melt 100g of the white chocolate in a bowl over boiling hot water and once melted remove from the heat.
2. Let the chocolate cool, but make sure you whisk it a bit and ensure it doesn’t cool completely if not I will get cold and hard – I suggest you leave the melted chocolate in a bowl sitting in warm water.
3. Beat the butter and sugar very well and after that your egg, gently – Ideally, an electric whisk would be good, but I didn’t have one (my stuff is still in Cape Town) so I had to do this the hard way.
4. Next, add your sugar to the mixture and mix until creamy
5. Now, add the melted white chocolate, which you should pour in and mix in very well until uniform in mixture.
Stir in your sifted flour and baking powder and after that, the cranberries, nuts and white chocolate chunks – and also your redberry spice if using. Ah! the redberry “lovespice” something unusual that I got from a colleague that has freeze dried red berries and taste great with this cookie.
Form into a sticky dough and place into the fridge for about 10-15 minutes – WHY? I find cookies bake better if they are a bit cold as opposed to warm.
You will need to bake this twice as you won’t be able to fit all the cookies onto a baking tray all at once.
Make the dough as uniform as possible into balls and make sure they are outlined on the lined baking tin as far as possible, because when they bake and flatten out you don’t want them to join – I’ll suggest about 6 at a time and you should get about 12 large cookies in total.
Bake for about 12-14 minutes and as soon as the cookies begin to get brown on the edges, take them out – DON’T worry if they look soft, they will get harder when they cool down and you want soft centred cookies in any case.
Let the cookies cool on a wire rack for at least 20 minutes on a wire rack before you fight temptation and eat them.
They are so great that one of my colleagues bought them the second time I made them and refused to share them even with her family.
Recipe from Drizzle and Dip by Samantha Linsell with slight modifications from moi.
Follow Samantha on twitter @drizzleanddip
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