My Favourite Biscuit Recipe

My go-to, absolute favourite homemade cookies are so easy to make and always result in people asking for a copy of the recipe!

They are soft, fluffy on the inside, and taste like everyones favourite cookie with a red monster on the front ;)

INGREDIENTS:: (Makes approximately 20 cookies)

125gm of soft butter

1.5 cups of brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla essence

2 eggs

2.5 cups of plain flour

1tsp baking soda

.5 cup each of dark and white chocolate buttons (or 1 cup of either)

METHOD::

Cream together with beater butter, brown sugar and vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, lightly beating.

Sift and add to wet mixture, flour and baking soda.

Fold in chocolate buttons and stir until combined.

Shape them in your hands and lay them out on a tray. These expand a lot in the oven (almost doubling in size!) so leave a lot of room between each cookie. 

Bake on 180 degrees for 12-15minutes or until light golden in colour.

YUMMO! Enjoy!

And just for fun, here's a wee hyperlapse video of Milla and I making our weekly cookies!

 

 

The Cookie Project

(picture source)

Inspired by The Cookie Project (in which Lisa is delivering a batch of cookies to a difference house in her street each week) I decided to share my favourite cookie-time-esq-cookies with our neighbours on Valentines Day. They are a flat of hard working tradies, I figured they could use some doughey, chocolately goodness, and I really want a good relationship with the people around us.

They were quite surprised and repeated their thanks. It just so happens the next day they cleared up a massive pile of foliage that was blocking our shared driveway. When I inquired, they said "we figured we should get rid of it since its not fair to dump it there".

So, if one batch of cookies gets a dump-run and a clear driveway I wonder what a cake would get? heh. Jokes!

Thanks Lisa for the little push out the door! :)

Ninja Bake - Bakers Registration 2013

-Registrations are now closed-

It's back! The second annual Sisterhood Ninja Bake! 

Get your whisks, beaters and camouflage gear out ladies! You have received the call up!

October 18-19th 2013

The Ninja Baking weekend is all about blessing someone with a fairly simple gift: Our love in the form of bikkies, scones, muffins, cakes, or a secret recipe!

Last year's Ninja Bake saw 77 bakers dropping off 170 batches of baking - I think this year we can at least double that. So go on, blow me away (I know you will anyway!)

Tell everyone you know that they have the opportunity to become a ninja for a weekend (*costume optional*) and get baking!

The Sisterhood are a (large and growing) group of women all around New Zealand, our sole aim is to bring smiles and bless others, we love to surprise nominated women with gifts and love, sent from strangers "just because". Anyone can be involved! 

There are two parts to this mission, first, we need bakers, then, we will need nominations. 
Here are the details for the bakers:

The Bakers:

• Commit to baking for a deserving Sister(s) in your neighbourhood

• You have until September 25th to register

• Its your job to be an excellent ninja. Keep their details private, move in stealth, don't be seen!

• Bake as much as you would like but you will need to inform us so we can allocate you the right number of nominations

• You can bake anything, but have it cut up into pieces for easy family sharing

• Once you sign up, you will be sent Sisterhood poems and ribbons to decorate your baking with if you would like them.

• Its your responsibility to package the cookies in a clean container and make them presentable.

• You can bake for people you know or request to receive nominations of strangers, it's all on the rego form.

• Baking will need to be labelled (incase of allergies, tastes etc) and dropped off on the 18th or 19th of October

• You may be asked to take photos of your baking and write a small blurb about what its like to participate and be involved in The Sisterhood. These are both optional :)

The Nominations:

• Once we receive all of our baking registrations we will open up nominations, these will only be available in particular regions of NZ (depending on where our bakers are and how much they can do)

• Nominations for cookie drops will be open from 1st-7th October (so check back here later)

• Baking will be dropped off on the 18th-19th October

You can register to be a baker using this form below (you'll receive a confirmation in due course, along with some extra special details that we'd love you to know about, so please register if you intend to bake!)

(Registrations for nominations will be open from October 1st-7th - check back then!)

-registrations for bakers are now closed-

We had such a brilliant response to this event last year, people have been talking about it for the last 12 months, so I really hope you'll get on board and join in the fun this year! Woohoo!

If you've got this far and you've already registered as a baker, THANK YOU!

Please email me on sophieslim AT moo2.co.nz if you have any questions!

Love you all, seriously.

-Sophie

READ MORE:
the 2012 Sisterhood Ninja Bake

Being A Smart Wife

If I look back and take stock over my last three years I notice and appreciate how far I have come. 3 and a bit years ago I got married to my fiance, we moved in together, and I became a wife who cooked and cleaned and ran a house having previously never done anything like it before. My signature (and only) dish was a stir-fry which I had made about 3 times. 

Life became interesting.

Now, 3 years later I realise that I actually have learnt a lot in that time and I have become better at a whole lot of things. Everyday I continue to learn better and easier ways of doing housewife things but recently I have become much more interested in being smart at them.

That is, being smart with my time and methods. Is what I'm  doing really a good use of my time? Could I do this a faster, easier way? Do I even need to do this? Am I doing it well?

One thing in my home that I have a love hate relationship with it cooking and baking so I'm trying to get smart at it. You see, I love having food in my belly but I hate preparing it. Mostly, its a lack of knowledge and understanding of food. Oh, and a loathe of dishes.

Last week I realised that if I baked 3 batches of cookies all at once I still do the same amount of dishes and it only takes me about 10 minutes longer (!!!!!!)

So as I was going to bake my usual batch of Edmonds basic biscuits with chocolate chip cookies I tripled everything, rolled them into balls and freezed them in 10-biscuit-lots. 

Brilliant.

We have had "fresh" cookies almost every night this week, I simply take a bag out the freezer whenever we want them, put them in the microwave for 1 minute, push them down with a fork and bake for 10 minutes. We literally have fresh bickies in 13 minutes (before my milo has even gone cold)

Once I realised how genius this was of me I have since baked 20 individual handmade pizzas of different toppings to quickly pull out for lunches when I can't be bothered making the husbands lunch (yes, I make it, I know).

Now I'm looking for other ways I can be a very clever home maker. Do you have any ideas for me? Leave a comment and let me know!

Facebooking with Wooden Spoons

My Mother called me this morning "Wheres your electric beater?! Do you not have one?"

"Huh? It's broken. Why?"

It seems that even though I'm not on ol' Facey people still talk about me on there.

Last night the husband uploaded a video of me creaming butter and sugar while Milla looked on and tried to stick her hand in the mixture. I was using a wooden spoon and I didn't realise he had uploaded it. Hence the phone call. Mum will call me about almost anything that I put on the interwebs (hi Mum!).

Immediately I jumped on Facey to have a look. Whhaaat? Day Two: fail. Urg.

You might be pleased to know that I restricted myself; I didn't check any of the 11 notifications I had staring me down; I just wanted to see the video and see what part of our home life had been shared with the outside world. The video wouldn't load anyway. Double fail. Waste of time.

Lesson One: Facey is its own little world. Even if I'm not on it, it still exists and operates and I can chose to participate or not. I felt a little bit panicked when I found out that people were watching a video of me I didn't know existed and were commenting and liking and -I- wasn't reading the posts. (How many people liked it!? What were they saying? Did they think it was cute? Did they mock me for using a wooden spoon??)

The husband is a big social media user, when we were talking about my fast last night he didn't reallllly seem to understand it, asking why I couldn't just cut down my time and what was going off it going to achieve when I would just go straight back on when the week was over?

Well. Hopefully after a week my habit and need to check it every half hour might be broken. Maybe I wont feel the need to do that next week? Maybe with going cold turkey this week I'll get a gazillion things done and I'll think "I never want to waste time again". Maybe I'll realise how much I don't need it in my life. Maybe I'll make more of an effort seeing friends in RL because I wont know what they had for dinner last night.

Yesterday went wonderfully. In lou of Facey I cleaned mould (woohoo), blogged, read my book and played with Milla, saw a real life friend and went on two big walks and baked (with a wooden spoon). It was a great day! Today is shaping up to be just as good even though I slipped up a little bit this morning.

Walked into the lounge yesterday and "caught" Milla sitting up all by herself! BIG girl!