Terry’s Chocolate Orange cookies

In my family, each Christmas stocking traditionally holds (amongst a lot of other things) a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.  I haven’t opened mine yet and to be honest was getting a bit sick of chocolate having had Celebrations and Toblerone for breakfast most mornings these holidays (oh the shame!).

For some reason, while I was lying in bed last night thinking of something else entirely, it suddenly occurred to me that you could replace the chocolate chips in normal cookies with bits of chopped up Terry’s Chocolate Orange – it was honestly all I could do to not get up right away to try it.

This cookie recipe is really versatile: you can swap the Terry’s Chocolate Orange for around 200g of any chopped up chocolate or anything else you want (Smarties, value dark chocolate if you’re on a tight budget, chopped nuts, dried fruit, mini marshmallows or whatever you want – wish I had some Toblerone left to try that out) and you can also sub in a few tablespoons of cocoa powder in place of the flour if you want to make the dough chocolatey.

I baked mine for 7 minutes, the absolute minimum needed to qualify as cooked, because we both like them soft and doughy – the middle is still a little bit raw, which I like, but to avoid this, cook for a couple of minutes longer and you’ll get a crunchier cookie.

I got 18 cookies out of the mix, but only baked 6 of them and froze the rest (put the balls of dough on a greased plate or baking tray, stick in the freezer until hard, then bung them in a food bag) because I don’t think having 18 cookies between two people helps with the attempts to keep the diet balanced.  You can bake the frozen balls of dough straight from the freezer by the way, in which case you’ll want to add a couple of minutes to the cooking time.

• 225g butter/baking fat (I used Asda’s Best for Baking)
• 100g soft brown sugar (I accidentally used 125g of this and it was fine, but probably better to stick to the lower amount really)
• 125g caster sugar
• 1 egg
• 2tsp vanilla extract
• 225g self-raising flour
• Terry’s Chocolate Orange or around 200g of any chocolate, chopped up, or whatever other sweets, nuts or dried fruit you like
• A spoonful or two of milk, if needed, to make a good dough

Cream the butter/baking fat with the sugars.  Beat in the egg and vanilla extract, then add the flour and salt (you can sift in, but I didn’t) and gently fold through.  At this stage, mine looked too dry so I added in a wee drop of milk and mixed through.  Fold in the chocolate.

Space heaped tablespoons of the mix onto a greased baking tray (I don’t roll out or squish down, the balls spread out when cooking into cookie shapes anyway) and put in the fridge to chill until slightly firmer (20-30 minutes if you have the time – you can skip this if you need to, but the warmer the cookie is the more it’ll spread out in the oven).

Preheat the oven to 180C, and when heated up, add the baking tray(s) with the cookies.  Bake for 7-10 minutes, then allow to cool on the baking sheet.

PS This is not a sponsored post and we paid for the chocolate oranges – I just think they make for a really tasty cookie 🙂