Chocolate chip cookie perfection

The journey has been long. There have been cookies that were to crispy, too hard, too fluffy. So many imperfect batches... but the day has come!

As you can see, the sister agrees.

What I would say is that these are very sweet- you might like to reduce the sugar by 25% or halve the chocolate chips- you could even do both and they would still be pretty tasty. I don't though. Just saying...

This recipe is a de-americanised and somewhat customised version of these cookies. I take no credit for coming up with the recipe.

Makes 16

250g SR flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
170g unsalted butter, melted
220g brown sugar
100g caster sugar
1 tblsp vanilla essence/extract (up to you!)
1 egg
1 egg yolk (don't skip this, or add the whole egg)
2 cups chocolate chips- I use an assortment of white, milk, plain and dark, depending on how I feel

Preheat the oven to 165 degrees celcius and line some baking sheets with baking paper.
Mix all the dry ingredients (excl. the choc chips)
Dissolve the sugar in the butter. Beat in the vanilla and eggs until light and creamy.
Mix in the sifted dry ingrediants until just mixed.
Stir in the choc chips by hand
Chill the mixture for 1 HOUR before dropping heaped tblsps onto the pre prepared trays about 7cm apart.
Bake for 15 minutes or so, until golden brown with crispy edges.
Cool for a few minutes on the trays before transferring to cooling racks to cool completely.

Whatever you don't make immediately, roll into a sausage in some cling film and freeze. Just slice and bake as you want them. They take 17-20 mins from frozen.

Volcano Cake

I love a theme. I like the challenge and the way the cake becomes personal to its recipient. I made this for a geologist friend of mine.

And what about this bit of cake geekery... a magma chamber!

A magma chamber in the middle! I used a metal bowl for a tin- I used my favourite sponge recipe, but reduced the liquid just by about 20% so that I could smear it around the edge of the tin, pour in some batter that I'd died red, and seal the "chamber" by slathering more of the plain sponge over the top. It was a tense moment when i turned it out!

Very easy to decorate- a simple chocolate butter cream and some "artfully" splattered, thinner, red erupted magma buttercream over the top. Mini marshmallow "smoke" completes the look. The sign refers to our volcanics lecturer. There is a (semi) joke that the recipient loves him.

Liverpool FC 21st Birthday Cake

I had originally disregarded the idea of doing a shirt cake, as the carving process seemed too complicated. I used cakecentral for inspiration and thought I'd do a round cake, white, with red shorts/shirt/logo details. You need an account to view the galleries- but it's free and so worth it! If you're like me and hate junk e-mail, make sure you opt out of the e-mail newsletter.

So having decided on a simpler cake, I was in Looses cookshop in Norwich- whose top floor is a mecca for cake decorators. I'd never been up there and didn't ever want to leave. It's not cheap- but the products are good quality and the staff are extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I saw that they hire out novelty cake tins- genius, as you don't usually want to use them more than a couple of times! I got a t-shirt pan for a week for £5 plus a refundable £20 deposit. All tins are the same price no matter what their size. I'm going to bake another couple of "shirt cakes", do a crumb coat of buttercream and freeze them for future use. Cheeky!

Using the chocolate cake recipe they gave me- which rose beautifully, was deliciously moist and very easy- I baked the cake and let it cool for a couple of hours. I decided to try Sugarpaste (UK, or Fondant, US) and bought my first ever gel food colouring. I've wanted some of these for ages and they really are brilliant. You need to be careful colouring buttercream as the colour darkens over time, but sugarpaste stays fairly similar. Needed a good 1/2tsp to colour 1kg of sugarpaste that Liverpool red. I used a clean work surface dusted with icing sugar (good for compensating for the ish significant liquid contribution from the gel) and always placed the colouring in the centre of the sugarpaste, shaped like a flattened ball and pulled the edges over the top of it. Just a toothpick end amount at a time.

I cut the icing pieces free hand from thickly (3-4mm) rolled shop bought icing (*slaps hand). The adidas wording was a thin rolled "snake" of icing, rolled into the letters. Fiddly- but worth it!

Thrilled with the results, but would like to know how to cut away excess sugarpaste from the corners of the cake during the initial covering so that I get a smooth finish?I was pinching the ecxcess into triangles and slicing away, before crudely smoothing over with variable results. Any ideas?