Easy recipes for any cook: from cheat's meals to cooking from scratch

Brunch recipes

Celeriac-and-nut cake with date butter

45 minutes

Seafood recipes

Herby lemon-and-barley chicken soup

20 minutes

Beetroot recipes

Beetroot cake with rose-geranium frosting

45 minutes

Meatballs recipes

Pork meatballs and pomodoro sauce with tagliatelle

25 minutes

Lamb recipes

Yoghurt-marinated lamb steaks with mint pesto

10 minutes

Chocolate recipes

Roasted white chocolate

45 minutes

Lesley Cobb’s choc-chip cookies

Serves Makes 35 - 40

Difficulty Easy

Prep Time 20 minutes

Cooking Time 18 minutes

Ingredients

250 g butter, softened
250 g white sugar
250 g brown sugar
360 g cake flour
1⁄2 t salt
1⁄2 t bicarbonate of soda
2 free-range eggs
1 t vanilla extract
240 g chocolate (I used 3 x 80 g slabs plain Dairy Milk chocolate), chopped into small pieces

Method

Preheat the oven to 150°C. Lightly grease a baking paper-lined tray with cooking spray.
Cream the butter and sugar in a cake mixer. Sift together the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda.
Add the eggs, vanilla extract and flour mixture to the butter-and-sugar mixture and mix well. Add the chocolate and mix well by hand.
Roll into smallish balls and place, generously spaced, onto the baking tray. They will flatten and spread out while baking.
Bake for 15–18 minutes and remove from the oven while still pale gold in colour and soft to the touch. These are not crispy cookies, you want them to be deliciously chewy on the inside. You will probably need to make them in 2 batches as there is a fair amount of cookie dough.

Cook's note: Seb loves rolling the cookie balls and manages to eat a fair amount of delicious cookie dough, too. I don’t get the attraction of eating raw cookie dough but, like my son, I can hardly contain my excitement when the cookies, fresh from the oven, reach that perfectly warm, chewy cookie temperature that just cries out for a glass of cold milk.

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Lesley Cobb’s choc-chip cookies

Lesley Cobb’s choc-chip cookies

Ingredients

Method