Cooking With Jaye #2 - Super Easy Cookie Cakes

I'm a low fuss sort of baker, I love the finished product, but if I'm gonna spend time cooking, I want it to be super easy, fairly speedy (so I don't loose interest) and use as few utensils as possible so I have less to clear up.

I had half an hour to kill this week and decided to whip something up using what we had in the cupboards. I much prefer to make things like cookies and flapjacks, it's so much cheaper and you can tailor them to your fancies. Plus these literally took me about ten minutes to make, and then I baked them while I got on with my work. I made these by adapting an American recipe so it works off cups, but if you don't have cup measures, just use a small coffee mug as 1 cup!

What You Need:
One cup of soft butter
One cup of sugar (you can use brown or white, they are more cakey with white and gooeyer with brown!)
Two medium sized eggs
One tbsp of Vanilla Essence
3 cups of self raising flour (or use plain and add baking powder)
Chocolate (you can use whatever chocolate you want! I used Dairy Milk Caramel as it was what I had in my cupboards, but you can use anything, or a mix! I used two bars but you need roughly 250g)

It's all super easy, pre heat your oven to 180c/350f and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. Then, in a big mixing bowl beat the butter til smooth and then mix in the sugar. Add vanilla essence and eggs and beat together. Then slowly add the flour, mixing as you go. I found that after two cups, it was easier to use my hands to kneed it in as the mixture got a little thicker. The consistency shouldn't be too thick though!

Then it's chocolate chopping time! I cut each square into four, because I didn't want massive chunks, but you can cut it as big or small as you like, or have varying sizes in there (probably easier if you aren't using caramel chocolate!). Also, if you're planning on using caramel chocolate like I did, it's worth sticking the chocolate in the fridge for five minutes before you cut it, to stop all the caramel sticking to your knife! Then just mix it into the dough, it's as simple as that!

 From there, it's simply a case of spooning the mixture onto the baking tray, and sticking them in the oven. I kept mine pretty small but they still ended up as monsters! If I did them again I'd probably do them a little smaller, since they ended up huge!

Baking them is a bit of a guessing game, I'd say around 8-9 minutes, but go buy the colour, I took them out when they started to go golden round the edges. They'll be squidgy still when you take them out, but they'll harden up as they cool. I stuck them on a wire rack to cool straight from the oven, and then put them on a wooden chopping board when they were cool and put them on the coffee table when the boyfriend got home! So domesticated!

 Yum! Enjoy!

Do you have any quick and easy recipes?