Do you love baking, but struggle finding the time? Bake Your Sweet Time by TAT EFFBY gives you multiple recipes for classic crowd favourites, so you can try something simple for a quick sweet treat, or complex for a show-stopper.
Try a delicious recipe for peanut butter cookies.
ABOUT THE BOOK
What do you want to bake? How long have you got?
On a mission to make baking FUN as well as DELICIOUS, The Caketoonist has written her first cookbook to celebrate 20 classic treats in a variety of ways and featuring over 100 recipes. Using a treat’s classic ingredients and flavours, each chapter features multiple recipes arranged according to the time and effort involved in producing them, so you can fit the recipe to the time you have. You can knock up a batch of biscuits and still have time to file your tax return… or you can fully commit to laminated croissant dough when, happily, the hen weekend of axe-throwing and group tattoos gets cancelled.
It’s quick bakes for a quick fix in a 15-minute lull; it’s medium-length foolproof recipes for a 90-minute interlude; and it’s all-day, multi-step, big WOW bakes for when you’re lucky enough to take your sweet time over straining, proving, chilling or tempering.
QUICK RECIPE: PEANOT BUTTER COOKIES
Hands on 15 minutes
Ready in 30 minutes
These delicious, soft, little peanut butter cookies may be as cute as buttons, but they are useless for holding up your trousers. Filled or sandwiched with jam, they are however perfect for delivering a sweet and swift solution to a PBJ craving. You can choose to fill them with jam, like a thumbprint cookie, by pressing the back of a measuring teaspoon into the just-baked dough, or you can leave them to cool and sandwich them with jam instead. (If you want to swap the jam for chocolate spread, I’m happy to look the other way, provided you let me try one.)
MAKES
16 cookies or 8 sandwiches
Equipment
Large flat baking sheet
80g (2 3/4 oz) peanut butter* (either smooth or crunchy)
80g (2 3/4 oz) golden syrup
Large pinch of salt
25g (3/4 oz) plain (all-purpose) flour or gluten-free plain (all-purpose) flour + a pinch of xanthan gum
1/2 tsp baking powder
75g (22/3 oz) jam (jelly or preserve) of your choice (such as strawberry, raspberry, etc)
METHOD
Set the oven to 150°C fan (325°F/gas 3) and line a flat baking sheet with baking paper.
To a medium bowl, add the peanut butter, golden syrup and salt and mix with a spoon or a rigid spatula until well blended.
Add the flour and baking powder, then stir in until all the dry ingredients have been incorporated. If using gluten-free flour, combine the flour, xanthan gum and baking powder before adding.
Wet your hands, then scoop up 10g (1/3 oz) of the dough at a time. Lightly roll into a ball and place on the prepared baking sheet. If you prefer, you can spoon teaspoons of dough onto the sheet. Leave space in between each cookie to allow for their slight spread.
Bake in the middle of the oven for 8–10 minutes or until the cookies have puffed, their surfaces are lightly crazed with tiny cracks and they have turned a very pale golden colour. Don’t leave them to colour more than that or they won’t be softly chewy when cooled.
To make filled cookies, gently press the back of a 1/2 teaspoon measure into the soft dough to make an indentation in each one. Fill the indentations with a small blob of jam. Leave to cool for 10 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
To make sandwiches, do not make any indentations in the cookies; leave them to cool on the baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Spread a little jam on the flat underside of one cookie, then sandwich together with a second cookie.
*You can make these with any type of peanut butter: whole nut, with or without added sugar, with or without added oil, etc. Cookies made with a peanut butter that has added oil may spread slightly further than those without, but overall there’s very little difference in the results, so just use whatever you have in the cupboard.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Baking across social media and Substack as The Caketoonist, Tat Effby has built up a combined following of over 600k fans of her idiot-proof recipes and idiotic humour. Her fans include both culinary luminaries and comedy legends. As a cartoonist, Tat’s work has appeared in national publications such as the Guardian, the Observer, Private Eye and the Oldie. As a baker, Tat was relentlessly rejected by The Great British Bake Off for years. So instead of the tent, she took all her pent-up cake energy to social media and started sharing her dry sense of humour and moist sense of cake. Her videos, a frothy confection of detailed instructional recipes and very stupid jokes, have been watched over 90 million times.
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