I've mentioned Felicity Cloake a couple of times before here. Her food journalism has helped me shape varieties of chana masala and mung dal, as well as contributing to my not infrequent post-midnight immersions into recipe inspiration. She's been a contributor to The Guardian's food section for longer than a decade now, and has left a multifarious culinary trail that still continues to inspire. So, looking for something simpler to bake over the weekend, her recipe for the "perfect" chocolate biscuits seemed like a safe bet (and, yes, the resolution to make this was laid at approximately 2am of the night before baking).
Absurd as it sounds, I'm never sure how to feel about chocolate. This extends to chocolate flavoured foods, too. The world of ice cream is populated with numerous far-superior varieties, and I can't remember ever eating a chocolate cake that ever felt distinct enough to be memorable. That's not to mention that small aversion to hot chocolate that I continue to harbour. The sole stalwart ambassador is the noble chocolate brownie, but it's certainly a lonely specimen. So, what exactly drew me to a simple recipe for chocolate biscuits?
Part of this was based in my overwhelming trust in Cloake herself, however the rest can be explained away by an occasional compulsion to re-evaluate foods that I haven't greatly enjoyed in the past. I often find myself wondering whether coleslaw is truly terrible, or if I'm just scarred by a particularly haunting childhood recollection of knocking a pot of it off of a refrigerator shelf and splattering the viscous coating all over my bear toes. There is the occasional success story as well, with blue cheese, peanut butter and just about anything pickled (excluding eggs) being shining examples of this. Let's add these chocolate biscuits to the list.
Equipped with this revisionist zeal, I resolved to try out this recipe as soon as possible. My rationale here was pretty straightforward; if I'm going to open myself up to the promise of chocolate-based redemption, then where better to begin than with the perfect recipe? The only problem here, is that the skills of the baker must match the perfection of the recipe itself. Admittedly, my experience with baking biscuits, cookies and the like is a complex one; the results are rarely unpleasant, but there's a certain clumsy (let's call it "rustic" perhaps?) element which pervades it.
The first issue that I encountered, which could have been entirely mitigated through the radical action of reading ahead, was that I don't own a stand mixer, nor an electric hand mixer; just a sole balloon whisk with wires that are eager to be freed from their confines. Did this preclude me from creaming the butter? No, but it did take me a lot longer to do - both in terms of aerating the mixture, and the time it took to rest my overexerted arms. Below, I'm going to provide the original recipe with instructions for a stand/electric hand mixer, but don't let this discourage you if your appliance landscape is as sparse as mine! Just be prepared to get a little bit more involved.
Speaking of insufficient kitchen supplies, it also so happens that our weighing scales are currently out of service. Again, not an insurmountable stumbling block, but it did mean that I had to convert quantities from weight into volume and use a measuring jug for this purpose. Trying to line up a level dose of flour or syrup against line markers does invite a degree of imprecision into the process. Usually, I wouldn't bat an eyelid at such a quibble, but I wanted to follow Cloake's conception of the biscuits as faithfully as I could.
There is also the question of my dubious skillset. Not that this is a recipe that I would describe as challenging, however it does involve shaping, slicing and generally-keeping-things-in-one-piece; all things that my not-so-delicate hands are at risk of fumbling. You may be thinking, "this is your 25th post on a home cooking blog, surely you can make biscuits?" Firstly, I'd like to issue a long, shrill eek. Once I've been retrieved from my inadequacy panic, I'll make an impassioned defence of the intrinsic imperfection of home cooking, and the responsibility we have to write with honesty and sincerity.
So, anyway, it turns out that I'm not great at rolling dough into a perfect cylinder, so the biscuits were ended up being blessed with what I'm choosing to call a charming irregularity. Slicing said cylinder also just so happened to be an issue too, and a few of the dough semi-circles had to be encouraged back into wholeness. They did all make it on to a baking sheet though, and isn't that the most important thing here? Let's disregard the varying degrees of thickness and the provocative issue of spreading (I shuddered too, don't worry).
The process sounds fraught with disruption, yet it ended with 12 biscuits (okay, there would have been more had my knife hand been more deft) that bent slightly, before snapping cleanly and had a firm chew to them. Cloake's assertion of producing a biscuit which actually "tastes like chocolate" was entirely correct, and they were all the better for it. Did they all share the same shape, girth and circumference? No. Did anyone really care? Well, yes, I did. But only because it is now 2020, and there is the need for Instagrammability.
The point about needing food to look presentable has been re-hashed and repeated and reconfigured into oblivion, but it's something I've found difficult to get used to. In my very first post, I talked about establishing a blog in 2019, and online food writing has now taken a very different form from what it was 15 years ago. I'm not accustomed to presentability, and it seems somewhat contradictory for home cooking; some of the very best meals are the ones that turgidly slop into a bowl without a jot of self-consciousness. If you look at the pictures attached to food blogs from 2005, say, they're certainly not ugly, but there is certainly a more loose and carefree style to them. If you could define my hemispheric biscuits in a complimentary way, you might say they were "loose and carefree".
Aside from the questionable morphology of the finished product (which I take full responsibility for), this is an incredible recipe. If you have the merest ability to bake biscuits, I encourage you to do it. As a non-chocoholic, I am convinced. As an endnote, I have to mention that I, along with flatmates-of-the-blog Owen and Rebecca, used these to make ice-cream sandwiches. While these biscuits aren't exactly of the ideal consistency to make ice-cream sandwiches (their firmness results in much of the ice cream being squeezed out of the sides), I can't bring myself to not recommend this. You could even deconstruct the sandwich concept and use the cookies as a topping instead. Let me tell you, the possibilities are endless and I do encourage you to realise them.
Also, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but the dough is just sensational. I'm sure a spoonful of it won't go amiss in during the preparation process.
Last disclaimer (I promise) - my phone is currently broken, which is what I generally use to take pictures of the food I post here. I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to get a new one, so for the time being there might just be some somewhat dubious photography posted here as I'm using a pretty old tablet for this purpose. I'll keep the greats of 2005 food writing in mind here.
Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" Chocolate Biscuits
Preparation time: 1 hour
Baking time: 15-25 minutes (depending on your desired consistency)
Makes: 12-16 cookies
Ingredients
100g dark chocolate
150g butter
130g caster sugar
70g golden syrup
215g plain flour
45g cocoa powder
1/2 tsp of fine salt
Method
Roughly chop the chocolate into chunks. The size of the chunks is up to you. I prefer larger chunks, however the dough will be easier to slice if the chocolate is chopped more finely.
Put the butter in a food mixer and briefly soften it. Once the butter has been softened, add the syrup and the sugar and beat on a medium speed for 5 minutes until the mixture is aerated and fluffy. If you don't have an electric mixer, this stage will take longer but is by no means impossible!
Sift together the flour, cocoa butter and salt. With the mixer running on a low speed, add the dry ingredients until everything forms a dough. If you are mixing manually, then add your ingredients gradually before mixing together until it forms a dough.
Roll the dough into a sausage shape with a 5cm diameter, wrap in cling film and put in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes. This dough can also be stored in the fridge for up to 10 days (I've heard that the taste of biscuit dough gets better with age - but I'm not sure that I'd have the patience to test this!)
Meanwhile, heat the oven to 180 C (160 C for fan-heated ovens) and line two baking trays with grease proof paper. Once the dough has been properly chilled, remove from the fridge and slice thinly. Line each biscuit on the baking tray, giving enough space for spreading to take place.
Bake the biscuits for the amount of time corresponding to the kind of texture you'd like. If you want a softer biscuit, take out after 15 minutes, however if you'd like a snappier texture then bake for 25 minutes. I went for something in between and baked them for 20 minutes.
Leave to cool thoroughly on the baking tray before eating.
Notes & Adjustments
There are so many ways here I can think of so adjust the flavour here, and I'm going to name but a few.
Replace a tbsp of the cocoa powder with a tbsp of instant coffee powder for a darker, more mature flavour. You could replace a tsp of cocoa with some chilli or ginger powder for a spicier taste to go alongside the dark chocolate.
If you would like the biscuits to be slightly sweeter, then you could replace half of the chopped dark chocolate with chopped white chocolate. This would also give them more of a variable appearance. Including 1/2 a tsp of vanilla extract would also give it more of a homogenised sweetness. Feel free to experiment with all manner of flavours too!
If you want to really intensify the chocolate flavour then melt some dark chocolate and dip one half of the baked biscuit into it, before chilling (either on the bottom half or just on one side). You could also spread the biscuit with peanut butter.
One of my favourite things about these biscuits (besides the texture is the slight saltiness). If this is something that you like too, I think it would be great to sprinkle them with a small amount of coarse sea salt before baking. If you do this, you may wish to reduce the amount of fine salt in the mixture slightly.
Replacing the caster sugar for dark brown sugar will give the biscuits more of an intense, burnt caramel taste if that kind of thing is to your tastes.
On a final note, I really do have to tell you about the pie that FOTB Owen made for FOTB Rebecca and I. It consisted of Quorn chicken replacement pieces, spinach, mushrooms, peas, green beans and sweetcorn bound together with butter, chicken stock and chilli flakes, encased within a little cottage of pastry. I've never made a pie before, and the idea of someone baking one for you is so homespun and quaint an image that I felt ready to settle down with a plot of wildflowers and a companionable cow named Bessie.
Now, a pie that holds it shape completely and ice-cream sandwiches that definitively do not; what more could you ask for, eh?
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