Chocolate Chip Cookies and Chocolate Chip Nut Cookies Recipe

Glorious hot from the oven chocolate chip cookies - just what your family wants!

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Well it's a chilly old morning in England, the season doesn't know what it is, one minute we're having hot Summery days in October and a few days later it looks like we're halfway between Autumn and Winter. Basically it's dull, dull, dull and I need something for my family and I to look forward to later on so with that in mind, I'm doing Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Now my husband is a nut fiend, absolutely any nuts will do, although we don't have almonds in the house because of my daughter's allergy. So I went looking in the cupboards for the pecans or the hazelnuts - lo and behold someone's scoffed them all, so then I was thinking what about peanut butter, but there's so many recipes for peanut butter cookies out there I fancied something a tad more decadent and discovered a packet of Cashew Nuts and since they're one of my favourites I will be adding them to half of the cookie dough to make a Chocolate chip and Cashew Nut batch of cookies.

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2¼ cups of Plain Flour (All Purpose Flour)

227g / 1 cup of Unsalted Butter

220g - 1 cup of Demerara Sugar

110g - ½ cup of Granulated Sugar

2 large Organic Free Range Eggs

200g - Galaxy Chocolate (or your favourite brand)

a handful of your favourite unroasted and unsalted Nuts

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon of Bicarbonate of Soda

2 teaspoons of Vanilla Extract

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The first job is to prepare the chocolate and the nuts:

• Heat your oven to 180ºC / 350ºF / Gas Mark 4.

• While the oven is heating chop the chocolate into small pieces, I normally aim for them to be a mixture of slightly larger than chocolate chips. You can use chocolate chips in this recipe but I find that the quality of the chocolate chips is sometimes not as tasty as my favourite bars of chocolate. Leave this to one side.

• Next we need to chop the nuts and preferably without them pinging all over your kitchen which used to happen to me until I found that if I use a serrated knife rather than a straight blade that doesn't happen, the serrated edges seem to take a hold of the nuts and keep them on the cutting board.

• Place the chopped nuts in a baking tray and bake them in the oven for 3-5 minutes or until they are very lightly coloured. Remember these are going back in the oven so you don't want them getting too much colour and becoming bitter.

• Now leave these to cool on the side while you make your cookie dough.

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Just that sentence 'make your cookie dough' is for me soooo exciting - and this dough is so edible that I'm amazed it actually makes it into the oven without being scoffed.

• In a large bowl add the flour, salt and baking soda and whisk together. Set this to one side while you prepare the sugar and butter.

• For this part of the recipe you will need either an electric mixer with paddle attachment or a handheld electric mixer. Into the bowl put your butter which should be soft but not warm and the granulated and demerara sugars. Beat these until they are thoroughly combined and they will end up looking a bit like a combination of smooth and chunky peanut butter.

• Using a spatula scrape down the bowl and add one egg and beat until it is totally incorporated and then add the second egg and again beating until you have a smooth mixture.

• Add the vanilla extract and beat just for a couple of seconds, oh that glorious smell.

• Add half your flour mixture and mix briefly, I recommend a slow count of fifteen but that's just me. but basically you don't want to overbeat this, we're looking for light and chewy cookies not a denseness.

• Add the rest of your flour mixture and beat until just incorporated.

• Using a strong spatula or a wooden spoon fold in the chopped chocolate (love words chopped chocolate, sorry I just had to type them again). Make sure that the chocolate is evenly distributed throughout the cookie dough.

• Split your cookie dough in half and one portion of it into a smaller bowl and add the cooled chopped nuts and mix thoroughly.

• Now this is the hard bit, you need to leave your cookie dough in the fridge for 6 hours, I tend to make the dough in the morning and then bake the cookies when the kids get home or my friends arrive for coffee later on. So wrap your portions of cookie dough in clingfilm, I twist mine into sausage shapes which I'll explain later, or you can pop it into freezer bags. Don't worry about them being perfectly round because they tend to spread into lovely round cookies while cooking.

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Much, much later:

• Heat your oven to 175ºC / 350ºF / Gas Mark 4.

• Line baking sheets with parchment paper. To prevent the paper from moving around when you're putting your balls of cookie dough onto them give them a quick wipe with some water and the parchment paper sticks to it and stays in place.

• Now if you twisted your dough into a sausage shapes then all you need to do now is slice the dough with a knife and pop them onto the parchment paper. If you didn't then you will need to form balls of dough that are about 2 tablespoons in size, you can judge this using a spoon or another useful method is to use a small ice-cream scoop, either way place the balls of dough on the baking sheet leaving about an inch between them as they will spread slightly while baking.

• Bake the cookies for 14 minutes, if you don't have a fan oven remember to turn the baking sheets half way through the cooking time so that they bake evenly. Remove the cookies from the oven when they are a golden brown. Note: Please be especially careful when you're baking the nut version of the cookies as if they become too dark the taste will be very bitter. You'll probably still eat them but it just won't be the same as when they're gorgeously golden and sweet.

• Transfer the cookies to your mouth - NO wait don't do that they're far too hot, no matter how good they smell and look (and they do) - transfer your cookies to a wire rack and leave to cool - although mine never make it to truly cool because they're great while they're still warm and the chocolate is still oozingly soft.

• The cookies will be very soft when they first come out of the oven, don't worry they will harden slightly as they cool but not too much and will remain slightly chewy in the middle - just perfect.

• I could say that these cookies will keep for a few days stored in a biscuit tin or cookie jar - but they never ever last that long in my house.

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I recently saw and coveted a gorgeous food mixer which was in a rainbow of colours - I haven't been able to find it anywhere on the internet so if you know what I'm talking about please leave me a comment, after all Christmas is coming.

Anyway although I can't find my rainbow food mixer what I have discovered is that they come in a yummy array of other colours, my favourite is the blue, what's yours?