Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chocolate and Spice Cookies
Get ready for spice and all things nice! Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is in our This Morning kitchen today with a festive sweet treat, which packs in a heap of healthy seeds and spices too. He's making his delicious cookies, which make the perfect gift this Christmas... if you can avoid raiding the cookie jar yourself first!
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Chocolate and Spice Cookies From Hugh’s book ‘How to Eat 30 Plants a Week’
Makes: 12
Ingredients
125g butter40g soft light brown sugar 2 cardamom pods (or 1⁄2 tsp ground cardamom)125g fine plain wholemeal flour 75g porridge oats50g sunflower or pumpkin seeds (or a mix)1 tsp ground gingerSplash of milk70g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), chopped into small (pea-sized) pieces
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C Fan/Gas 4. Line a baking sheet with baking paper.
2. Melt the butter and sugar together in a small saucepan over a low heat, stirring often until well blended. Take off the heat and leave to cool a little.
3. In the meantime, if using cardamom pods, bash the pods with a rolling pin to release the seeds then use a pestle and mortar to crush these. Discard the broken pods and use the crushed seeds.
4. Mix the flour, oats, seeds, ground ginger and cardamom together and stir into the melted mixture until evenly blended, adding a splash of milk to bring the dough together. If the mixture is still warm, leave it to cool for a few more minutes before adding the chocolate (so the pieces don’t melt). Stir to distribute the chocolate through the cookie batter.
5. Take dessert spoonfuls of the mixture and place on the lined baking sheet, leaving a 3–4cm space in between as they will spread a little on baking. Use the back of the spoon to flatten the cookies out well, shaping each cookie into a rough circle, no more than 1cm deep. (I aim for 12 fairly small cookies.)
6. Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes, depending on size, until the cookies are turning golden, and are more deeply coloured at the edges. They’ll still be a bit soft at this point: leave to cool completely and crisp up before removing from the tray. You can store the cookies in an airtight container for up to a week – good luck with keeping them that long!
Swaps
1. Try adding raisins, chopped dried apricots (unsulphured) or other dried fruit: up to 50g can be stirred in with, or instead of, the chocolate.
2. For nutty chocolate cookies, use roughly chopped hazelnuts, peanuts, cashews, walnuts or almonds instead of the sunflower or pumpkin seeds. You can use 1 tsp ground mixed spice instead of cardamom and ginger.