Madhouse recipe : Chocolate and Love Salty Cookies

In honour of Chocolate Week a couple of weeks ago, Chocolate and Love sent through a selection of their scrumptious chocolate bars, along with a couple of recipes to try out. As well as using the highest quality ingredients in their award winning bars, they also produce  Fairtrade chocolate, which makes a big difference to the lives of farmers and small business owners in places like Ghana and the Ivory Coast who work hard to produce cocoa. (If you want to see why buying Fairtrade chocolate is such a big deal, head over to the Fairtrade website.)

For this recipe, created by CPH Good Food, I needed two and a half bars of Chocolate and Love Sea Salt Chocolate, available at Waitrose and Ocado, which is utterly delicious. As were the cookies. I say were because sadly, they disappeared faster than I could cook them !

Chocolate and Love Salty Cookies

ingredients :

160g organic butter, softened

275g brown sugar

1 organic egg (60g)

250g plain flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. baking soda

¼ tsp. ground cinnamon (optional)

½ tsp. salt

100g “Sea Salt” from Chocolate and Love, chopped into big chunks

100g walnuts, coarsely chopped (or nuts of your choice)

A pinch of sea salt to sprinkle

Using an electric mixer, whisk together the butter and brown sugar for about 5 minutes, until white and creamy. (I did this by hand and it worked just fine.)

 Add the egg and continue mixing for another 2 minutes until combined and smooth. 

Break the chocolate into chunks - you can see the flecks of salt in there.

I didn't have any walnuts so I used some granola nuggets for extra crunch.

In a bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, chocolate and walnuts.

Stir the flour-mix into the whisked butter/sugar, little by little, until just combined. Don’t keep stirring.

The cookie dough now needs to rest between 4-48 hours in the fridge. Either shape the dough into a roll and wrap it in a piece of cling film or simply cover the bowl and place it in the fridge.

Pre-heat the oven to 200ºC (175ºC for fan assisted). Cut the cookie roll into 1cm thick slices or just press a scoop of dough onto a baking sheet in the desired thickness. Make sure you leave a little space between the cookies, as they can expand a little during baking.

If you’re fan of salty treats, why not sprinkle a small pinch of flaky sea salt on every cookie.

Bake the cookies for approximately 15 minutes or until golden around the edges, while still soft in the centre. Leave the cookies to cool down for 5 minutes before serving.

The great thing about leaving the cookie dough in the fridge for up to 48 hours is that you can make two batches on consecutive days - yum ! We got twelve big cookies but you could easily go for twice as many smaller ones.

Adding to this month's #KitchenClearout linky as it used up a bag of granola clusters that had been lurking in the snack box for ages.