On Monday I made some superb cookies - Rye and Raisin. I found them on Dan Lepard's website, whilst trawling through the recipe's in search of mince pies.
Elsewhere on these pages, I have mulled over the importance of being in the right frame of mind to bake successfully.
So bearing in mind that I am a Tottenham supporter, and that they had beaten Wigan FC 9-1 the previous day, my temperance was most definitely good as I gathered my various utensils to start on the cookies. In fact, I was euphoric.
There were a few distinct reasons why these biscuits worked, I think: Firstly, I only put four patties of dough on each baking tray, rather than trying to save time and squeeze more on - which inevitably results in the cookies spreading into each other, and necessitates some stringent knife-action to remould them whilst they're cooling. I also didn't press the doughballs down on the tray, I just left them as little golf-ball sized blobs, so that they didn't flatten quite so much whilst cooking. Lastly, I ignored the recipe's instruction to remove after 12-15 minutes, and took them out at 10, despite the fact that they were still wobbling and appeared to be barely cooked.
The result was 16 perfect cookies - crisp on the outside, soft in the middle and exploding with raisins, which made them even chewier. I could have happily eaten five of them (but didn't)
The other smile-inducing event of the weekend was, at last, the ownership of the Ottolenghi cookbook - given to me by my brother as a belated birthday gift. It's cake-porn, pure and simple (the savoury stuff is, of course, unbelievable too). I'm struggling to decide what to attempt first, but there are some plum and marzipan muffins in there which made my heart quicken. I might send some to Aaron Lennon and Jermain Defoe as an early Christmas present.
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