Birthday cookies

After a week of eating heathily, I have well and truly indulged today, after a visit from my parents, an Italian meal out, apple and blackberry crumble and a chocolate fudge cake my mum brought us! Still, I think after all my effort painting the living room and tidying these last few days, a treat was in order. Although that thought isn't really making me feel any less bloated.

A week or so ago, I made these cookies for Shane's birthday, as he's not a huge fan of cake (but he is a huge fan of chocolate). I'm not much of a baker, and whenever I've made cookies before they haven't worked out very well, but these I was pretty pleased with; they were the right balance between chewy but not undercooked.

I got the recipe from the BBC GoodFood website here, but I changed it by making up the mixture without the cocoa powder first, baking come chocolate chip ones, then adding the cocoa (halving the amount as it was only half the mixture) and baking the double chocolate chip ones after, so I had two different types of cookie. I also used chocolate chips and chunks, just to make it a bit more interesting and so that some bites were chocolate-ier than others. Also, I would say the recipe definitely makes more than 15, as it says on the website. If I remember rightly, there were at least 25, but they didn't really hang around long enough for me to count them!

I put the cookies, along with a few other little presents, in a picnic basket we have in the kitchen. Then I wrote out clues which were Radiohead lyrics with words missing and hid them around our flat, so he had to know the word and that would lead him to the next part of the flat and the next clue, like an Easter egg hunt, but with a basket of cookies at the end instead of an egg. I think mostly he was annoyed that I woke him up too early, but he seemed to like it in the end :-)

Song of the day: 'The Rip Tide' - Beirut