Jaffa Cookies

What have I learned.. Hrmm..

1. No matter what you do, photos taken on an iPhone will never look delicious.

2. No matter how poor you are, always buy the expensive chocolate.

3. Chocolate flavoured cake covering does not cope well at high temperatures.

4. Becoming teetotal will cause headaches, poor vision and extreme tiredness.

5. These cookies would have been so much better with some Grand Marnier in them..

6. Keyboard Cat makes all problems irrelevant.

Yeah, you heard me right, I've gone teetotal.

I'm just too poor at the moment to even consider going out boozing. Also, I've discovered a correlation between litres of cider consumed and the total amount of weight gained. Who knew Cider was so calorific?

Ok fine, I knew that already.. But it's so delicious!

It's not a permanent transition by the way, I'm just off alcohol until the end of March. There's a massive student trampoline competition in Ireland on the last weekend in March and I plan to be a little completely inebriated for the majority of the weekend.

 So anyway, now that you understand why I have been crazier than usual lately, let's get back to speaking about these cookies.

I've wanted to make something orange flavoured for a while and a few days ago, I discovered I had some oranges that were pretty old. I hate throwing food away though. So I decided I would use the whole orange in this recipe.

I learnt a way of making orange pulp from a famous British chef, Gizzi Erskine. She used the pulp to make a chocolate cake but I thought I would try to incorporate it in cookies.

So, the cookies turned out pretty well. However, I made a amateur mistake and tried to use chocolate flavoured cake covering as chocolate chips instead of decent, proper, expensive chocolate.

Big mistake.

The "chocolate" just melted and then congealed. It looked like burnt caramel by the time the cookies came out of the oven.

I learnt my lesson.

I've adapted the recipe for the orange pulp. It needs much longer in the oven due to the orange pulp, but the intense sweet citrus orange flavour you get by the end is totally worth it.

Jaffa Cookies

1 + 1/2 cup Plain Flour

1/2 tsp Baking Powder

1/2 tsp Salt

1/2 cup Butter, cold, cubed

3/4 cup Caster Sugar

3/4 cup, Brown Sugar

1 Large Egg

1 cup Chocolate Chips

1 Orange

250ml Water

Place the orange (peel and all) in microwave-friendly bowl and add 250ml of water to the bowl. Cover with clingfilm and microwave on high for 20 mins. Remove the orange, cut it in half and remove any seeds. Place the orange in a food processor with 1/2 cup of the orangey water from the bowl. Blitz on high until you only have a smooth purée left. Set aside to cool down.

In a bowl, cream the butter using an electric whisk. Add the sugars and orange pulp to the butter. Mix well until smooth. Add egg and beat together until combined.

In a seperate bowl, measure out the dry ingredients; flour, baking powder and salt. Mix the dry ingredients into the sugar/butter/orange mixture a little at a time. It's important to mix the flour in until just combined, do not overmix. Finally, fold in the chocolate chips.

The dough needs to be refrigerated between 12-24 hours. I suggest making it the night before and allowing it to chill in the fridge overnight. This is important as it allows the cookies to bake properly.

When the dough has been chilled, pre-heat the oven to 190 C / 375 F. Line a baking tray with some greaseproof paper. Break off pieces of the dough and roll into balls, about 1 + 1/2 inches in diameter, and place on the baking tray spaced 2 inches apart. Bake for 20-25 mins.