The best cookies ever, and a homemade bag…

Bright and early on Bank Holiday Monday, I ventured back to the wilds of Swindon, to the BBC Radio Wiltshire building to give the listeners of Mark O’Donell’s Mid Morning Show my final analysis on my Make Do and Mend Year. I have been in regularly during the course of the year, and wanted to take a small gift to say thankyou.

So I baked.

Nigella’s Chocolate Shortbread Cookies from her Christmas book.

These are my favourite biscuit ever, both to make, and to eat, and I can’t believe I have got to within a week of finishing the year without blogging the recipe, so I will rectify this now.

This is what you need:

• 250g butter at room temperature (try to ignore the fact that this is a whole packet of butter…)
• 150g caster sugar
• 300g plain flour
• 40g cocoa
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1tsp baking powder

This is what you do:

• Pre-heat the oven to 170C
• Line 2 baking trays with baking paper or re-usable liners
• Put all the ingredients into a Magimix type food processor and whiz until it forms a dough
• Place tablespoons of the dough onto the trays, and roll them into balls. I get 20-24 from this mix. I like to then flatten them down a bit with a fork as I like the ridges that it leaves
• Bake for about 15 minutes, remove from the oven and allow to cool for 10-15minutes before removing to cool completely on a cooling rack

These freeze really well, so if by any crazy chance you can’t scoff 24 in a day or two, then stash the rest in the freezer. My boys quite like them straight from the freezer!

So, biscuits made, I needed something to transport them in. I have run out of the stash of cellophane type plastic bags that I bought ages ago, and am reluctant to replace them, as they are not real cellophane, and are not recyclable, so I decided, at 9pm at night, I wanted to make a bag….

A quick spot of googling later, and I managed to find these instructions here for an origami style bag. I scaled up the size a bit and used grease proof paper instead of fancy embossed paper, but was pretty chuffed with the results.