Carrot Cake Cookies – May’s BakedIn Baking Club Box

I haven’t blogged about BakedIn Baking Club kits for a while. That was because some people had read the posts expecting to be given the recipes to recreate the bakes themselves. These recipes are exclusively created with and approved by Michel Roux OBE, one of the world’s top pastry chefs, especially for BakedIn. Obviously then it would be very wrong of me to share the actual recipes. These recipe kits used to only be available to members of the BakedIn Baking Club as part of a monthly subscription. Now though, BakedIn have decided to sell the kits to anyone who wants to give them a try. So now I feel I can comfortably blog about them without people being upset at not having the recipes. If you like the look of the recipe, you can now buy the kit yourself! Brilliant news! The only catch though is you only have a month to buy it. The Baking Club kit is sold as the BakedIn Bake of the Month, so is only available until the next month’s box is sent (or until it is sold out, whichever comes first).

In case you don’t know about the BakedIn Baking Club, it is one of the best subscription boxes you will ever find. Each month you are sent all the dry ingredients you need for that bake, as well as extra bits and pieces like baking paper, piping bags, testing skewers, butter measures, and of course a very beautifully presented recipe card with colour photographs of each stage of the recipe. You just need to add a couple of fresh ingredients such as eggs, butter or cream. The recipes are great to make with children, and are perfect for any skill level. Any tricky processes are clearly described, making them achievable by everyone. The thing I love most is the range of recipes they come up with. You might have baked something similar before, but the BakedIn recipes are always so much better! For example, last month was a tea loaf, something I bake a lot, but I have never had one anywhere that has tasted as delicious as their recipe did. The beauty about having these kits is that you then have the recipe forever to make again and again. All this costs £8 if you pay per month with postage included in the price, or £7 per month if you pay in 6 monthly chunks. That is a fantastic price for everything you get!

So on to this month’s bake, carrot cake cookies. This recipe is my favourite BakedIn recipe ever! In fact it is so delicious I made it twice in as many days! I adore carrot cake so knew I would love these. They exceeded my expectations by miles though. My Other half isn’t a massive carrot cake fan but he adores these cookies! Absolutely scrumptious cookies, crunchy around the outside, soft and chewy inside, topped with an amazing cream cheese icing. I have made carrot cake flapjacks before (see the recipe for those HERE) but these cookies are my new favourites. (Incidentally, if you want the very best carrot cake recipe my lovely Twitter friend @zoetcm has an amazing recipe on her blog HERE).

The carrot cake cookies are one of the easiest recipes we have had in the Baking Club. There is literally nothing that can go wrong with these, unless of course you forget to turn your oven on or forget you have them baking!!! They are a nice quick bake so perfect for when you have unexpected guests and want to give them something super scrummilicious. They are also ideal for lunchboxes and picnics. And as I discovered, they are great at getting rid of midnight munchies! (Yes I did sneak downstairs in the middle of the night to have one hehe).

I used an ice cream scoop to place my mixture on to the baking trays as I wanted them to all be a similar size. That worked really well. I didn’t flatten them too much as I like chunky cookies. When they had cooled I piped some cream cheese icing on them but had loads left over so went back over them with more.

You can never have too much cream cheese icing! The second time I made them, I added a few drops of orange extract to the icing and that tasted amazing too. The orange really went well with the carrot cake flavours in the cookies. I shall be making these yet again today, that is how much we all love them! The recipe makes 12 cookies but they are so addictively moreish they disappear rapidly!

 

If you would like to make these cookies too and have a wonderful recipe to add to your repertoire, you can buy this box as a one-off kit HERE, but be quick… this recipe will only be available until Mid June 2018, or sooner if they all sell out. The box costs £8 plus postage.

If you would like to join the Baking Club and receive the monthly recipes with free postage, click HERE. You will be able to choose whether to pay monthly, 3 monthly, or 6 monthly.

Happy Baking!

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Banoffee Cookies… November’s BakedIn Baking Club

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t particularly excited about making this month’s Baking Club bake. I know, it’s a terrible thing to say but it’s the truth. The box arrived a couple of days ago, conveniently dropping through my letterbox so there was no waiting around for it to be delivered. The first thing that I saw was the lovely bright new packaging… a beautiful green which made it stand out from the boring brown envelopes which arrived with it.

I get really excited to open this box each month to discover what wonderful recipe I will be baking. I am a huge fan of Michel Roux, so to receive all the dry ingredients I need to create one of his exclusive recipes is just a joy. I opened this box with my usual eagerness and after opening the lovely paper that the ingredients are wrapped in, I saw the one word I usually really don’t like… banoffee. I have a huge sweet tooth but I have never found a banoffee recipe of any description that hasn’t been disgustingly sickly and far too sweet. So, in all honesty, my heart sank a little when I opened this box.

How silly was I? I should have known this would be different! After all, in all the time I have been subscribing to the Baking Club, there hasn’t been a single bad recipe. I can honestly say with my hand on my heart, these cookies are ridiculously scrumptious! The perfect amount of sweetness, not sickly at all, but bursting with flavour and texture. They contain fresh banana as well as dried banana chips for amazing flavour, and delicious fudge pieces for texture and indulgence. I like cookies to be chewy not crunchy, and these were perfect. Lovely and chewy and moist, with a little crunch from the dried banana on top. All finished off with a drizzle of white chocolate on top. They were delicious still warm from the oven, and they were delicious cooled completely. In a word… Heaven!

I have loved BakedIn Baking Club from the instant I received my very first recipe box, and this month I love them even more for introducing me to a banoffee recipe I can finally enjoy! I will be making these cookies again and again as we all really really enjoyed them. That’s the beauty of this Club. The recipes come with ingredients pre-weighed for you, but the recipe card clearly tells you how much of each ingredient you have so you can make them whenever you want to in the future too. I keep all my recipe cards from them in a folder so I know where to find them quickly.

I cannot tell you the amazing recipe that I used to make these treats, as it is exclusive to BakedIn and it wouldn’t be fair. However if you would like to join the Baking Club and receive these fantastic recipe kits for yourself, click HERE to receive your first box for the incredible price of just £1.99! After that, it costs just £7.99 per month which includes postage. Well worth every little penny.

Happy Baking!

Peanut Butter and Jelly Thumbprint Cookies Recipe – Zombie Jelly Babies

I seemed to enjoy PB&J treats this month! First the no bake cheesecake, and now these cookies. I was sent these Bassetts Jelly Babies in the September Degustabox (review for that coming later) and thought they would be perfect in a cookie. My first attempt went terribly wrong. I discovered that Jelly Babies have a knack of disappearing when you cook them, leaving a jelly stained hole where they had been. I refused to be beaten by a Jelly Baby though so I finally have the recipe for you. If you cook them whole, Jelly Babies vanish. Cut them into pieces and they just melt. Perfect! I wasn’t going to put a Jelly Baby in the melted jelly but my son Luke said it would look as if they were either melting or forming out of the jelly, so we decided we would call these Zombie cookies. As you can see by the picture though, the black ones had mostly already been gobbled up by this point so we only managed one black jelly zombie. Oops! Anyway, these are very quick and simple and great fun to make with children, and would be a perfect treat for Halloween. Here is the recipe:

PB&J THUMBPRINT COOKIES – ZOMBIE JELLY BABIES

70g unsalted butter, softened

70g golden caster sugar

1 large egg, beaten

200g plain flour, sifted, plus a bit extra to help roll the cookies

2 tablespoons smooth peanut butter

20 Jelly Babies

• Preheat the oven to 180C. Line a baking tray with baking paper.
• Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the egg and mix well. Add the flour and peanut butter and mix well until thoroughly combined. The cookie dough will be a bit sticky but stiff.
• Knead the dough together briefly then divide into 8 portions. Dust your hands with a bit of extra plain flour, then roll each portion into a ball. Place on to the baking tray and lightly flatten each ball. Dip your thumb (hence the name) into water, then press into the middle of each flattened ball. You want a nice round hollow, but make sure you don’t go through the bottom of the cookie.
• Cut 12 Jelly Babies into quarters, then place 6 quarters into each thumbprint hole. Place on the middle shelf of your oven and bake for 12-15 minutes, until lightly golden.
• Remove from the oven and place one whole Jelly Baby carefully into the melted jelly of each cookie. Leave on the baking tray for 10 minutes, then cool completely on a wire rack.

If you do make these with children, please just remember that melted jelly is extremely hot and sticks to skin, so make sure little fingers are careful when placing the whole Jelly Babies into the baked cookies.

Happy Halloween!