The Artful Dodger

A few weeks ago, I bought a beautiful pottery rolling pin from an antique shop in Holmfirth. It gave me the excuse I needed to get some jammie dodgers and cookies made: pronto! It also gave me the excuse to buy this book from Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pie-Angela-Boggiano/dp/1845334892/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337029414&sr=8-1 which makes me go mmmmmmm with every page turn!

So, back to the biscuits! I decided I wanted to make heart shaped jammie dodgers and so checked out a recipe via Cherry Menlove's blog. Cherry Menlove is Britain's swishy haired answer to Martha Stewart - a bit like Marmite as she does divide opinion but I tend to think that her blog can be viewed as tongue-in-cheek, rather than in earnest. I also reckon you'll see her on TV soon, so remember her cool name if you haven't heard of her before.

The rolled out dough is stamped into heart shapes.

The hearts are paired off on to a greased baking tray and the
interior heart is stamped out.

Once the biscuits have been cooked and cooled they can be sandwiched together with good quality jam to make yummy jammie dodgers! I tend to use Wilkins and Sons jams as I think they are the tastiest jams and have the best range of flavours. We tend to have strawberry and raspberry as there is debate over which is the better fruit in our house.

If I'm honest, I think Cherry's biscuit dough is a bit too buttery and soft - I do prefer a more crunchy sort of biscuit, but with a tweak and here and there, it would be perfect. I added some vanilla bean paste to my dough which I loved and would do again.

I also made a batch of gooey chocolatey chip cookies using the recipe from the cookery book of my childhood...

I just replaced the milk chocolate chips in the recipe with the same amount of roughly chopped Green and Black's Dark 70% chocolate - why go to the trouble of making your own cookies to fall at the last fence by scrimping on the chocolate?

They came out of the oven looking and tasting pretty damn fine!