Paula Deen + Ina Paarman + Hardspear's Kitchen = Chocolate Gooey Butter Cookies

Paula Deen is big in the USA and especially known for her hearty comforting Southern Cooking. Ina Paarman is the Queen, Diva and Doyenne of South African Cooking. Both these Ladies are Serious Business Women as well and have created veritable food empires in their respective countries.

Throw Oprah Winfrey and J. Hardspear de la Azotea in the mix and you have a winning recipe. I was watching an Oprah show on how a boy overcame the sorrow of his twin brother dying of cancer by starting a home business baking cookies and the story really touched me. Oprah asked the boy what his favourite cookies is and he replied without hesitation - Paula Deen's Gooey Chocolate Butter Cookies. In true Oprah style, she then produced Paula Deen with a flourish. The look of surprise, adoration, excitement and emotion on the boy's face caused me to choke and tear up.

The very next day I went on Paula Deen's website and obtained the recipe for the cookies. People who read my blog will know that I am a proponent of the slow food movement and making things from scratch with fresh ingredients. Now... it is impossible not to be seduced sometimes by the Americans and their easy and effortless way of doing things. Paula Deen's recipe is a stellar example of this. I had to adjust the measurements to suit the products available in SA though, and because Mrs. Paarman is known for the quality of her products, she was the natural choice. So here then the best chocolate cookies I have ever had.

Chocolate Gooey Butter Cookies

Makes two dozen.

Ingredients:

1x teaspoon vanilla extract or essence

Icing sugar, for dusting

1x 600 g box Ina Paarman chocolate cake mix

1x 250 g block (NOT TUB) Philadelphia cream cheese, room temperature

2x eggs

125 g butter, room temperature

Directions:

Preheat oven to 180˚C. In a large bowl with an electric mixer, cream the cream cheese and butter until smooth. Beat in the eggs. Then beat in the vanilla extract. Mix in the cake mix with a wooden spoon. This takes some elbow grease. At first the mixture will look crumbly, but keep on mixing till it combines nicely into a ball. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours to firm up so that you can roll the cookie dough into 2 long sausages. Slice each sausage into 12 equal sized medallions. Form into balls and then roll them in icing sugar. Use 2 ungreased baking sheets and arrange 12 cookies on each, taking care to leave spaces between the cookies. Bake 11 minutes. The cookies will remain soft and gooey. Cool completely and sprinkle with more confectioners’ sugar, if desired. Do not be tempted to eat straight from the oven – they are really much better cooled down. I’ve found they are best if kept in an airtight container in the fridge. Don’t over bake. These are not biscuits as we South Africans are used to – It is an American Style Cookie.

(photo from Paula Deen's website)

Potato Soup

Saturday morning Lamb and I decided to invite friends over for dinner. Enthused by my new passion for home baked bread, I devised a simple menu of bread and potato soup. I made a focaccia using the ‘sponge’ method described in the post below. Just before baking, I brushed the top with olive oil, fresh garlic and fresh rosemary (I forgot to sprinkle the salt flakes). This is my own version of potato soup and it is truly delicious, very easy to make and surely will impress your guests. This is one of my top winter warmer comfort foods. 5 large potatoes peeled, quartered and boiled till soft. 1 Chouriço (Portuguese) or Chorizo (Spanish) sausage 1 Kassler chop 2 large onions peeled and chopped 2 chicken and 1 beef stock cubes dissolved in 1 ½ litre of water. (I won’t insist on making your own stock or using expensive concentrate) Olive oil Little bit of lemon zest Juice of half a lemon Freshly ground black pepper.

(Serves 4 generous portions – increase stock & potatoes for more guests – double Chouriço and Kassler if more than 8 people)

Remove the piece of bone on the Kassler (but keep it) and chop together with the Chouriço to pieces roughly half the size of dice. Fry on low heat till browned in a large saucepan (including the piece of Kassler bone). Remove the meat with a slotted spoon and fry the onions slowly in the same saucepan till translucent and light caramel colour and add the stock. Increase the heat and simmer for 5 minutes. Drain the onions with a sieve and discard. Add the stock and meat back to the saucepan. Add the potatoes and carefully mash the potatoes – you want part to remain whole and the rest will thicken the soup. Simmer on a very low heat for 10 mins, add lemon zest, juice and black pepper. (Remove bone) Serve with a nice crusty chewy bread. The Chouriço imparts its wonderful spicy flavour to the soup and the Kassler adds extra smokiness and depth. Do not add any salt and be careful using too many stock cubes or too much stock powder/concentrate as the Chouriço and Kassler are salty already. Lamb contributed this easy and very good dessert. Some foodies may frown upon this, but trust me – it is good. Pour 1 litre Ultra Mel Custard into a bowl. Heat in microwave. Break up 1 box of Romany Creams Chocolate biscuits (not too small) and mix into the custard. Allow to cool completely before serving.

The table the next morning...

The smell of freshly baked bread

Up till last week I never did a lot of bread baking, as I am never satisfied with the results. It always comes out too dense and you have to eat it as it comes out of the oven – I’ve found my own homemade bread becomes stale before the day is even out. Once I became inspired by reading about bread baked the old fashioned way with a sourdough starter instead of commercial instant yeast. I set out to culture my own starter, with a recipe off the net, but failed. Recently I mentioned my desire to make my own sourdough starter at a braai. Most of the guests looked at me as if I am mad, but the hostess got very excited and said she has a book with instructions which she will borrow me provided that I give her a piece of my starter should I succeed. The book – “The Village Baker - Classic Regional Breads from Europe and America” by Joe Ortiz proved to be a treasure. This guy and his wife own a bakery in California. His mission was to produce very good quality breads, so he visited so called Village Bakers all over France, Italy and Germany to see how they do it. This book has cleared up the mystery of bread making and baking to me to a very large extent. Last week Thursday I have started a new sourdough starter, and so far it seems successful. I should be able to bake with it by tomorrow. With a sourdough starter the aim is to capture natural wild yeast in the air into a mixture of water and flour. This starter can then be used as a leavening agent instead of commercial yeast. It is a slow process though. The method I am trying this time calls for ¼ cup of flour to be mixed with 2 tablespoons of water. This is achieved by making a well in the middle of a small mound of flour and pouring the water into that. The flour is then mixed into the well slowly with your fingers. The result will be a firm dough which should then be kneaded for about 8 mins. One should then end up with a little dough ball the size of a walnut. This is then put in a small bowl, covered with a damp cloth and left in a warm draft-free place. After 2-3 days a crust will have formed, which if removed reveals that the dough has started bubbling and will smell slightly acidic. Without going in to much detail, this is then refreshed twice (every time a couple of days apart) with increasing amounts of water and flour till you are left with a cup or more of the starter which should be sufficient for an ordinary loaf. It is not necessary go through this every time, just keep some of the starter and refresh it (daily if you leave it in a warm place and weekly if you keep it in the fridge). In the meanwhile, I have started to experience with other methods, like the direct method with instant yeast as well as the ‘sponge’ method. I made these Hot Cross Buns from a kit sold by Woolworths. Lamb got it as a gift – but I couldn’t see her making it. The enclosed recipe and ingredients called for using the direct yeast method. This means one adds a sachet of instant yeast to the ingredients and knead it till it forms a dough and let it rise (prove) once. The smell from the oven whilst baking was indescribable. They were very nice straight from the oven, but were totally stale the next day. Here I tried baguettes using the sponge method (the one looks like a turkey drumstick or a club though). With the sponge method one use a lot less instant yeast than is called for in a recipe. The first step then is to create a ‘sponge’ by mixing about half the amount of yeast ordinarily required with flour and water to end up with something the consistency of pancake batter. It is then left in a bowl covered with a damp cloth (somewhere warm out of any draughts) 4-6 hours till the mixture has first tripled in volume and then fallen back on itself. The rest of the flour and water, salt etc. as required by the recipe is then added and left to prove for another 2 hours again. After this second rising the dough is knocked back and left for half an hour. The loaves can now be formed, put on a baking tray and left to relax for 15 mins. The baguettes only bake 15 – 20 mins in a hot oven. I tried one of the tips in the book, which is to put the dough in the fridge instead of a warm place for it to prove and rise much slower (up to 12 hours). A much more interesting texture can be created this way, and wow did it work. Inside the loafs were full of irregular large holes and it was chewy and delicious just as one expect from a rustic French loaf. Although the sourdough bread is my aim, I started experimenting with more common methods in order to start practicing the kneading and all the other steps & techniques in baking bread. With Joe Ortiz’s book as my companion, I learned quite a lot – stuff that as I have said, was quite a mystery to me before. Now I cannot wait for tomorrow, so I can try out the sourdough starter which I cultured myself.