Liz Polding shares another of her easy-to-follow baking recipes.
These are really easy to make! They are based on a Nigella Lawson recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Now chocolate chip cookies are lovely and everything, but somehow, more chocolate, and possibly some caramel seemed more the thing. So here we are. There are various chocolate caramel buttons which work nicely, but my personal favourites are the Cadbury’s Caramel ones. They are basically giant chocolate buttons, filled with caramel. I suggest two packets because you are bound to eat some while you are making these, for quality control purposes, if nothing else. Aldi do some really quite nice ones which are, shockingly, much cheaper, but they are less lovely to eat during the preparation stage, so more end up in the cookies. So it’s swings and roundabouts, really.
Anyway, you’ll need two packets of whatever you choose. About an hour before you start, put them in the freezer. This, unsurprisingly, freezes them, so that when you put them in the cookies and into the oven, the chocolate doesn’t melt quite as quickly and the buttons are more likely to remain buttons and not become an oozy caramel puddle around each cookie (although that isn’t actually a bad thing).
Ingredients:
- 150g of unsalted butter
- 125g of soft light brown sugar (or light muscovado works too)
- 100g of caster sugar (golden caster also works fine)
- 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
- 1 egg
- 1 egg yolk
- 300g plain flour
- ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- Two packets of caramel buttons
Method:
The oven needs to be at 170 degrees and you will need one large or two medium baking sheets. Line them with baking parchment.
- Melt the butter and let it cool a little bit (you are going to add eggs to it quite soon after this, so it shouldn’t be too hot).
- Put both types of sugar into a bowl and beat in the butter.
- Add the egg, egg yolk and vanilla and keep beating until it is creamy and combined.
- Mix together the flour and bicarbonate of soda and add it to the other ingredients a bit at a time so that you don’t get any off-putting floury lumps (or if using a mixer, chuck it all in at once and just let it do its thing, scraping the sides of the bowl from time to time until it is all combined).
- Take the caramel buttons out of the freezer and fold them in with a spoon (don’t let the mixer do this bit; your precious buttons will be pulverised!).
- Using your fingers, make balls of dough filled with buttons and put them on the baking sheet. You aren’t going for tiny little cookies; there should be about a handful of dough in each one. Space them out a bit on the baking sheet(s). They will spread in the oven and if there isn’t room around each one, you won’t get the slightly chewy edge and softer middle; they’ll just be a bit squidgy all over. Again, not necessarily a bad thing.
- Bake for 15 minutes, leave on the tray for about 5 minutes or so once you take them out, otherwise they will fall apart when you try and remove them. You may find that you have caramel leakage. Use a teaspoon to fold the caramel back onto the cookie while they are still warm.
- After leaving them for 5 minutes or so, put them onto a wire rack to cool. Do let them cool down before eating them; hot caramel can be a bit hazardous!
I find these usually last up to two days with a teenage boy around. I’m told they will keep a bit longer, but can’t verify that, unfortunately.
Enjoy!
