We writers tend to get obsessive over our craft, if we’re not careful we could talk about it all day, every day. And not everyone wants to hear all the little details of plot, characters and marketing successes and failures. Nor do they want to be bombarded with a constant and incessant ‘buy my book’, refrain.
I try and keep away from becoming too narrow in what I post or share about myself. I want people to see that I’m not just a writer. I like to spend my time doing other things, one of which is cooking. Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), I’m a sucker for an ingredient that I’ve never seen or used before, and will often buy something and then see what I can do with it afterwards.
I spotted this, I can’t remember where now, and my thought process went into overdrive, it’s pretty readily available, somehow I had never noticed it before. Now I see it everywhere, in various brands and sizes.
I’ve tried cooking with peanut butter before, it’s great mixed with Sweet Chilli sauce to make a coating for chicken or pork, however, I’d never had much success using it in anything that was sensitive to the amount of liquid in it. Like biscuits. For one thing, peanut butter is too wet and you have to modify the other ingredients and proportions to allow for that (if you can). So when I saw the powder, a whole new range of possibilities opened up.
My first idea was a peanut cookie. Now I know you can just add chopped peanuts to an ordinary cookie but I wanted to see what difference substituting some of this powder for the plain flour would make.
Ingredients,
175 g softened butter,
200 g Plain flour
50 g of the peanut butter powder,
90 g Caster sugar,
100 g roughly chopped salted peanuts
Method,
Cream the butter and sugar. Add everything else and work into a dough. Form the dough into a sausage and coat it with Demerara sugar. Wrap it in cling film and rest it for 30 minutes in the fridge Preheat the oven to 160°C.
Take the chilled dough and slice it into 2 cm discs, flatten them onto a baking sheet which has been dusted with more Demerara sugar. Keep them looking slightly rustic at about 1 cm thick.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, keep an eye on them, as soon as the edges start to brown, they are done. Take them out and let them cool for a few minutes before transferring to a rack.
The addition of the powder made for a very short pastry and boosted the flavour. The biscuits melted in the mouth and were very hard to resist. In the end, I didn’t bother.
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I’ll be back on Thursday with another Indie Showcase, see you then.
