Peanut Butter & Choc-chip Biscuits

In my mind, there is very little doubt that cooking is both one of life’s greatest pleasures and one of life’s greatest skills. Far too many people still cannot cook well enough. Jamie Oliver seems to agree with me.

Luckily for me, when I still only a small child my mum started teaching me how to cook. One of the first things I ever cooked by myself (of real recipes, not toast and the like) was these biscuits. They are extremely simple, and extremely tasty.

It’s quite possible to leave the chocolate chips out of this recipe altogether, in which case you’ll end up with peanut butter biscuits. You don’t need to make any other modifications to do this.

Ingredients

• 100g of peanut butter (whether it is smooth or crunchy doesn’t matter, but I prefer crunchy)
• 100g of butter or margarine
• 175g of sugar
• 1 egg
• 150g of self-raising flour
• 250g of chocolate chips

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160 degrees celcius (320 degrees fahrenheit, 430 degrees kelvin).
2. Put the peanut butter in a large mixing bowl. It’s easiest to put the mixing bowl on the scales, tare (zero) the scales, then add the ingredients by weight.
3. Add the margarine and sugar to the bowl, and mix together.
4. Add the egg, and mix together.
5. Add the flour and the chocolate chips, and mix together.
6. Grease some oven trays (I use three trays, your trayage may vary). I use a spray can of vegetable oil.
7. Spoon the mixture (using a teaspoon) onto the trays. The size of the balls should be about 1″ across and 0.5″ high (roughly). Leave about 3-4″ between them.
8. Put them in the oven. The hardest part of the whole recipe is figuring out when they’re done. About 12-16 minutes is usual. 12 minutes will get you softer biscuits, 16 minutes will get you harder biscuits.
9. About 5 minutes after taking them out of the oven, prise them off the trays and place them on a cooling rack. If you don’t have a cooling rack, put them back on the oven tray upside-down. The idea is to let the moisture out of the biscuits so they will be chewy and crunchy instead of soft and floppy.
10. Enjoy!