Hi everyone,
It seems to me that the weather here in the UK has been trying to add to the general unsettled feeling lots of us seem to be experiencing lately. I took this photo at midday last Saturday.
Two words that would describe the last week here in Edinburgh: haar and mizzle.
Recipe: Paris (Isolation) Cookies
This is one of my favourite recipes from Ella Risbridger’s multi-award winning book Midnight Chicken.
The book is a meditation on using food to put yourself back together. It’s the kind of beautiful writing (and illustrations!) that make this a cookbook to curl up on the sofa with, to dream of filling your flat with friends and feeding them with leek lasagne, sticky ginger beer chicken wings (they work with tofu too, I tried it!), and roast chicken. And then cookies. Oh, the cookies.
The mixture comes together in a flash - I made them on Friday night while my dinner was in the oven, baked off about a third of the batter (all that would fit on one baking sheet), and froze the rest. I forgot to sprinkle the salt on top, like always, but they were delicious. They were also pretty messy, all expanding into each others’ personal space (cookies aren’t good at social distancing). Instead, I’m sharing a photo from when I made them back in April and managed to get a Golden Hour shot.
I’m not going to reproduce the recipe here, because Ella has posted it in her Instagram Stories, under their new title Isolation Cookies.
I will tell you the modified ingredients quantities I use, partly because I don’t want to use the extra egg yolk and then figure out what to do with the white part of the egg, and partly because as it’s just me a slightly smaller batch of cookies is never a bad thing:
130g salted butter
230g light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract (let’s be honest I usually just measure out one capful from the bottle of vanilla flavouring)
190g plain flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
150g chocolate chips
Now, hie thee to Ella’s insta for the recipe, and enjoy cookies in less than half an hour.
Kitchen Tool: Mixing Jug
When I was a child, I envied my mum’s Mason Cash mixing bowl. I think my granny had one too, both of them well-loved and with decades of cake mixes made in them.
I always imagined that I would know I was ‘properly grown up’ when I had one of these bowls myself. But I had my head turned by a fancy French bowl from across the Channel. Ooh la la!
This is the one piece of Le Creuset cookware I own. Obviously, it came from TK Maxx for less than £20. It is their Mixing Jug/ Batter Bowl. There are three key ways in which this bowl outranks the classic Mason Cash. (This is a hill I’m willing to die on, clearly):
The handle - makes it much easier to stop the bowl wobbling all over the countertop when mixing.
The deep sides, tapered inwards at the top - these play really well with a hand mixer, containing the ingredients and not leaving the kitchen covered in sugar. I especially reach for this bowl whenever I’m using icing sugar or cocoa powder, both of which like to go everywhere.
The pouring spout - makes it really easy to scoop cake mixture into the tin. I just got Flora Shedden’s Aran Bakery cookbook which has lots of loaf cakes I can’t wait to make (and I’m still thinking about the lemon, ricotta, and thyme cakes in Benjamin Ebuehi’s The New Way To Cake). The most recent cake I made was Deb Perelman’s Cannoli Pound Cake, which was incredible and which disappeared too fast to take any pictures. What hardship, to have to make it again!
Cafe Shout-out: Lovecrumbs’ Nice Times Bakery
I wrote a love letter to Lovecrumbs back in Email #1 - and excitingly they have recently opened the hatch on the side of their Morrison St bakery for contactless cake and coffee sales.
Well. I say hatch, you say ‘sash window.’ The Georgians were onto something!
Last Sunday I had such a slow start to the day that I missed all the cakes… but managed to have a much-needed hot chocolate to sip slowly, nectar of the gods that it is.
Aaaah.
I hope you’re all staying safe, and that your weekends are filled with the most weather-appropriate option of hot chocolate or cool soda.
Speak to you soon, thanks for reading!
Find me on Instagram:Â @LilyMCooks
If you liked this email, please share it with a friend:
Read back issues here:
And please feel free to reply to this email to tell me what you thought :)