Thursday 21 February 2008

My First Taste & Create: Curly Wurly Cookies!

I signed up for my first ever Taste and Create last month... and that was almost as far as it went! It wasn't until I received a comment from Grace over at A Southern Grace that I realised my confirmation had been trapped by my spam filter. (At the same time, I found a missing invitation to Blogging By Mail - sad to miss that one - but can't wait for the next!)

Anyway - back to T&C!

Taste And Create is a blogging event where you sign up and are matched to another blogger at random. You then have to look through each other's blog, then make and blog about one of their recipes! As I said - I was matched up to Grace - a southern USA gal, living in New York. I've always been fairly sure I was Scarlett O'Hara in a past life - so I think it's a good match!

Grace blogged about my coconut rotis that I learned as part of my Sri Lankan cookery course - check out her recipe here!

I looked through her epicurean endeavours, and immediately fell in love with Ebenezer. I'm not a natural baker, though am trying to improve my knowledge and skills... (watch this space for efforts good and bad!) I have been thinking about creating a sourdough starter for some time. Unfortunately, with the whole notification spam thing - I only had a few days to get this blog out - nowhere near as long as I'd need to cultivate my own little sourdough pet!

So instead I opted for the Toffeed-Up Oatmeal Cookies. Given I've had moderate success in making cookies before I hoped to be successful...

Now, before I proceed any further, I'd like to give a disclaimer... My cookies don't look anything like the ones in the pictures. Something weird happened and they went very flat and thin. I'm thinking it may have been too much butter, and maybe the type of toffee... I'll let you know when I try my second batch! Unfortunately that was my last chance to bake before the deadline, so I didn't have time to try again!

However... HOWEVER... Despite appearances, they tasted amazing! I let them bake for about 8 minutes, and the toffee went all chewy, and they had a winning combination of crunch and chewiness... they just didn't look too pretty!

Curly Wurly Cookies!


It was fun using cups to measure this - I've had a set for years, but hardly ever use them!

So there was a couple of things I had to change: I was out of baking powder, so used bicarbonate of soda instead; I'm not used to measuring butter with a tablespoon, and didn't know if it meant heaped, level or rounded... I think my equivalent was about 50g; and finally Grace's recipe called for Heath bars - I figured Daim bars would be a good replacement... unfortunately the supermarket didn't have any, so I had to opt for curly wurlies!! I also did everything in the food processor - yay for lack of dishes to do!!


  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup flour
  • 1/2 cup porridge oats
  • 1/2 cup curly wurly, chopped
  • 50g butter, at room temperature
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 egg
Preheat oven to 180 c (350 f)

In my food processor, I mixed the butter, vanilla extract, and brown sugar to a cream.

I added the egg and whizzed until well mixed.

Add the flour, baking powder, salt and mixed until well combined, then add the porridge oats and pulsed to mix. Fold in toffee.

Place tablespoon-sized blobs of dough on cookie sheets and bake for 8 minutes or until they look "set" and the bottoms are just golden. I had to let mine cool a little before I could peel them off and pplace them to cool on a wire rack.

The original recipe said this would yield 2 dozen cookies, but I only got 14 from it. I think next time I'll add a bit less butter, and an extra 1/4 cup oats. I also think the softer caramel in curly wurlies probably broke down too much, so I will hold out for the daim bars!


Thanks for a great recipe Grace - I look forward to making a friend for Ebenezer soon!!




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4 comments:

Valerie Harrison (bellini) said...

I love this event Kitten :D It is just a lot of fun to make a dish that someone else loves. I have also tagged you for a MEME. There are a lot of these going around lately so even if you just participate by visiting my blog I will be happy :D

grace said...

wow, i never realized how many differences there are in reading US and UK recipes--i'm glad the cookies worked out for you anyway! and i've never heard of curly wurlies, but they sure look awesome! :)

oh, and if you do decide to attack a sourdough project, let me know about it!

Anonymous said...

I just made these because we had some left over curly wurlys! Amazing! So gooey. I did the less butter/more oats and they do still seem to be quite soft. I put the dough in the fridge before i baked them so maybe i didnt realise how runny the mix was! Maybe even more oats next time! but delish nonetheless. thanks! x

no one said...

I stumbled across this recipe whilst looking for a solution to my Curly Wurly surplus - and I'm glad I did! My cookies looked very similar to those in the photo, although I reduced the butter and added more oats, as the poster recommended. However, I had a nightmare peeling the cookies off of the baking paper - I'm not quite sure what caused the stickiness. Overall though I'm pleased, and may try them with self-raising flour for more of a cakey, fluffier biscuit.