Tara's Killer Chocolate Cookies

Let's try something else. A little baking, ably assisted by b2. This recipe was originally published in an article on ex model Tara Moss in an Australian magazine called Australian Taste in 2002.

1. Wash hands, make sure you have a clear and clean workspace, assemble ingredients, light oven (ours is gas) and allow to preheat to about 180 c. Importantly butter and egg should be at room temperature. Grease and line your trays as preferred.

2. Weigh out sugars, making sure the brown sugar is smooth with no little hard water affected lumps. Cut your butter into cubes then add to sugars. Mix together with electric beaters, don't be shy let it have it.

Keep going until the mixture is light and fluffy and the sugar "melts", you should almost not be able to feel it between your fingers when you rub them together. This photo shows at about the half way stage.

3. Add egg and vanilla. Beat together.

4. At this point you are ready to add the dry ingredients.

NB While the recipe calls for self raising flour in our house we make our own by adding baking powder. The habit developed a long time ago after walking into unfamiliar commercial kitchens where I couldn't be sure just what was in the flour bins. People have a habit of mislabelling things and when you are using kilos of flour at a time the results can be interesting. About two teaspoons to 200 gm flour gives a reasonable result.

Sift the flour and salt together then add the choc bits and sultanas. Mix into butter with a spoon.

Sorry, forgot a step...lick beaters

As you mix the ingredients be mindful of not crushing the mixture, you want to keep as much air in the mixture as possible. Towards the end as it amalgamates scrape the sides down. When there are no floury pockets present you're there.

5. Pull a piece of dough from the bowl. For what I was after about the size of a large marble (or die 20 for the gamers out there). Flatten it slightly then roll between the palms of your hand until it the ball has no large cracks. Pop it onto your tray staggering the biscuits so they don't touch when they expand during cooking.

Put the trays in the oven, it should make about 38 biscuits. time will be about 15 minutes.

The oven we have is a rotisserie oven which has a lot of bottom heat and no fan so things tend to burn on the bottom before they are cooked inside. So the biscuits get flipped over for a couple of minutes towards the end of cooking to give them that little extra.