Marble Cookies

Recently we had an abundance of chocolate in the house. Dark chocolate, milk, white, chunks – way more than we usually have. It was begging to be used – and I wasn’t complaining ;D

My first thought was to make a marble cake – have dark chocolate and white chocolate flavoured mixtures all nicely swirled in one loaf. But literally none of my books had a simple recipe like this! So, that was out. But I still liked the marble idea so I chose marble cookies.

I thought about melting the light and dark chocolates and incorporating into the halved mixes, but apparently the chocolate flavour doesn’t come through when you do that. Why? Anyway, then I found this little booklet which came with the latest issue of Olive magazine:

I love these little books! Its well worth buying the magazine just for them (although Olive is a very good magazine). Some of the chocolate recipes were a bit random (chocolate martini, anyone?) but also inside was the recipe for “black and white pinwheel cookies”. You get the swirled look by laying the chocolate dough on top of the vanilla dough, and rolling it up like a Swiss Roll. The recipe itself just puts cocoa powder in the chocolate half, but I used some of our dark chocolate chunks and put them in. They made it a bit harder to roll and cut flat, but the taste was worth it! For the plain dough, I added some extra vanilla essence to make the dough stand out more.

In the end result, I think these cookies were okay. I am no1 cookie fan so I still managed to eat a good few :) but I think they could have had something a bit more special. I could try putting white chocolate in the vanilla dough, or perhaps orange for an orange/chocolate combination. They were not the best use for the chocolate abundance – but they were yummy and it just means there is another excuse to use more chocolate next time!

Black and white pinwheel cookies

Makes 40

unsalted butter 200g

golden caster sugar 150g

vanilla extract 2tsp

1 egg

plan flour 300g, sifted

cocoa 25g

1. Cream the butter and sugar using an electric mixer or hand-held electric beater.

2. Beat in the vanilla and egg, then add the flour. Beat until smooth, remove from the bowl, halve and beat the cocoa into one half. Shape both dough portions into rough oblongs. Wrap in cling film and chill for 30 minutes until firm.

3. Roll out each dough to £1 thickness, trying to keep the oblong shape. Put the chocolate dough on top of the white dough and trim the edges to neaten. Roll up lengthways like a Swiss roll, then wrap in cling film and chill for 45mins.

4. Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160/gas 4. Slice the dough into discs as thinly as you can, put them on a non-stick baking sheet and cook for 15minutes. Cool on wire racks.

There was a bit more chocolate dough than plain, so I made some more chocolate biscuit shapes with it. Until next time :)