Foodie Bob

As I mentioned in this post, last week I took part in the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap 2011. This involved baking 3 batches of 12 cookies and posting them out to fellow food bloggers.

Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies

After a lot of thought, I decided to go with some delicious Orange Chocolate Chip Cookies. I was going to try a new recipe for Coffee chocolate chip cookies but I know that a lot of people don’t like coffee flavoured cakes/biscuits so thought it best not to disappoint anyone.
Below is the recipe I used if you want to try baking some yourself. The recipe makes about 18 good size cookies but you can half the amounts if you don’t want that many.

This is a great basic recipe for cookies. They come out soft and creamy and if you don’t like orange you can leave it out and just make chocolate chip cookies.

Also, you can make a big batch of the dough, freeze half of it and just defrost it when you need some more!

Ingredients for the Cookies:

• 225g Butter (softened)
• 225g Castor sugar
• 350g Self raising flour
• 200g Dark chocolate drops (Or milk or white chocolate if you prefer)
• 100g Condensed Milk
• 2 Oranges

If you don’t have any condensed milk (you can get small tubes if you don’t want to use part of a tin) you can substitute it with 100ml of milk (preferably full fat). However If you do this I would leave out the orange juice as otherwise the mixture will be too wet.

You can make the cookie dough by hand but I prefer to use a food mixer as it’s much easier (but DON’T over mix!).

To Make the cake:

1. Heat oven to 180C or 160C for a fan oven
2. Put the sugar and butter into a large bowl and cream together


Cream the butter and sugar

3. Zest the 2 oranges and add the zest to the bowl
4. Juice the oranges and add 4 tbsp of the juice to the bowl
5. Add all the remaining ingredients (flour, chocolate and condensed milk) to the bowl.


Add the remaining ingredients

6. Stir together until it everything is combined and is starting to look like a dough


Cookie Dough

7. Get 2 baking trays and place a piece of baking parchment on each. You can use greaseproof paper instead but baking parchment is soooo much better (try it, you will be amazed at how much less it sticks).
8. Now start pulling off bits of dough, and roll them into ping-pong sized balls (just a bit smaller than golf balls). You are aiming to have 18 equal sized balls.
9. Place 9 balls in each tray, equally spaced apart. They will spread out loads when they cook.
10. Now press down on each ball to flatten them a bit into little disks.


Dough ready for the oven

11. Place the trays in the oven and cook for about 14 minutes until they are just starting to brown. Don’t be tempted to cook them for too long otherwise they will harden up and be more like biscuits than soft chewy cookies.
12. Once cooked, take the trays out of the oven and allow the cookies to cool for a bit before taking off the trays.

The cookies should keep for about 6 days if kept in an airtight container but I doubt they will last that long without being eaten!