After 7 long nights of an ice-cold house (our boiler broke down & only got fixed on Wednesday), this week, I've been mostly channelling my inner Ina/Nigella/Martha/Rachel (yom!) and doing a lot of baking. It has been said before that I'm not too bad in the kitchen - planning is my middle name - so with that in mind, I was challenged to make "yummy cookies" by Babsie, one of my colleagues from a book left in the office by The Book People. She flagrantly disregarded the laws of copyright by photocopying the chosen recipe & presenting it to me. I haven't made biccies in ages, mainly because I've been disgustingly addicted to banana bread... some of which is in the freezer taunting me.
So, last night as I did my triple point shop in Tesco (got to build up those Clubcard Points for another free trip to France), I bought enough buhher, sugar & chocolate to cause a major diabetic coma and elevate my depressed colleagues to a sugar-induced high. I got stuck in (didn't soften the buhher enough and splatted most of it over my hob & coffee machine) and 20 minutes later, had the most evil chocolate cookies ever. I don't use cheap gear when I cook because I don't see the point - that's what shop bought is for! So, buoyed up by that success, I decided to tackle a batch of $250 Nieman Marcus Cookies (but cut the quantities in half because my poor food processor would have collapsed with the shock (Dear Santa, can you bring me a KitchenAid mixer in stainless steel?).
Hubs was very excited (he's only allowed to have the broken biscuits) so I made the ginormous batch of dough, froze it all in sausage shapes and chopped it up like black pudding rounds and baked it for 10 mins. It is absolutely gorgeous... even nicer than last night's Chocolate Extravaganza and is all promised. We're going to a drinks party tomorrow night at our Best Man's house - the WAGS as we are charmingly referred to, monopolise the sofa to watch the X-Factor final, and the lads skulk around the kitchen moaning about us watching crap telly and poor Hubs hovers between the two as he loves the X-Factor!!! Our gift to them is a tin of our homemade cookies. There's plenty left over for my poor sick nephew & niece who have raging conjunctivitis and are feeling very sorry for themselves (Handsome Man stayed in his PJ's all day today because he wasn't well... but will still eat biccies when I bring them over). And my goddaughter/niece Lucy Loo has demanded her fair share too.