Have you ever made bread cookies? Or even better, have you ever made bread and chocolate cookies? Haha, I have. Yesterday.
This recipe is a recycling recipe. But… it almost seems like calling it that doesn’t make it look good, right?
It is so, yes. Saying “chocolate cookies” makes everyone cheer. Yes, yes, I want chocolate cookies tooooo!!! But “recycled cookies” or “no-waste cookies”? Come on, let’s admit it, it doesn’t have the same appeal, it doesn’t give the same emotional taste sensation, it doesn’t evoke the same chocolate aroma that normal (and perhaps seen and reviewed) chocolate cookies can give.
To enjoy recipes like this, you need to be like me.
First of all, you need to be waste-free enthusiasts, like me. The idea of throwing away food disturbs me. And since Lisa Casali’s ideas started circulating, I finally feel better, finally, someone thought about making this public. Finally, recycling leftovers and the no-waste concept have been untethered. And it was about time.
And then you need to be experimenters. There is no recipe I do better than the improvised one. There is no recipe, no matter how excellent and tested, that gives me results as good as the ones invented on the spot.
I open the fridge, or a kitchen cupboard, see what’s there, and decide. Then while mixing, or cutting, or pouring, I might even change my mind and within three minutes three other ideas pop up that make me modify what I had already started.
But for some inexplicable reason, in the end, it always results in a recipe my husband praises and the kids say “Make it again”.
Then maybe, it happens that when I want to impress, I make a thousand messes, and I mess up, burn, bake undercooked donuts… Things like that.
But these bread and chocolate cookies (stale bread and forgotten chocolate), on the other hand, are the result of one of those days of successful experimentation. Which was yesterday. Although it all started the night before.
The night before, I had soaked the stale bread in milk because I wanted to remake (or better, revisit) my bread cake. I felt like making a dessert with rum. And then I had stale bread to use.
And some candied orange peels, also to use.
I had made them a few days ago, the peels, because I wanted to gift them to my friend Sandra, but something went wrong, and they turned out all crumbled. Maybe the tarocco peels are less suitable for candying, until now perhaps I had always used navel oranges and didn’t think about it too much. Or maybe I simply cut too much white part, and they were too thin. Fact is, at the time of caramelizing, they turned into crumbs. Good eh, but absolutely not giftable and absolutely to be used immediately.
So, I put the bread in the milk, it was supposed to stay for about an hour.
Instead… during that hour, I fell asleep on the couch! 🙄 and all my plans went astray.
The next morning, that is, yesterday morning, after breakfast and after taking the kids to school, and before starting my workday, I decided I had to.
“If I leave the bread here until lunchtime, who knows what other unforeseen events will happen before evening!”.
So, after half a minute, I had already added the peels, sugar, rum, oil to the bread, and mixed it quickly.
Then I realized I didn’t have cocoa.
Does it happen to you too suddenly to remember things forgotten for… ever? There you go.
Well, this was the moment when I remembered the chocolate. I’m even a bit ashamed to confess it here, where everyone can read it, but it’s the truth. And I always tell my kids that you should always tell the truth! 😀
So… this chocolate… it was in the freezer. Nothing strange. But… it’s a leftover from last year’s Easter eggs!! It hasn’t been a year, no, but still…
So, practically, what I’m proposing is a post-Easter recycling recipe, only a bit late (a lot) or early (not much) 🙂
It was my friend Sarah, she is the culprit, who taught me this beautiful and clever thing about freezing Easter eggs. The chocolate keeps perfectly, especially for using in desserts. Although for me it has a downside: I forget it!!!
During this (almost) year, I bought tons of chocolate, I won’t tell you how many bars I have in the house right now, 70% and 50% dark, milk, with whole hazelnuts, with crushed hazelnuts, with oreo (I have that too, yes), not to mention chocolates… but every time I decide to make a dessert, I don’t remember having a mountain in the freezer!
But yesterday, the mysteries of the human mind, I remembered.
And bread and chocolate cookies were born.
- Difficulty: Easy
- Cost: Low
- Rest time: 2 Hours
- Preparation time: 20 Minutes
- Portions: 25 cookies
- Cooking methods: Oven
- Cuisine: No-waste
- Seasonality: All seasons
Ingredients
- 5.3 oz stale bread (I used Tuscan bread)
- 0.8 cups milk
- 1.8 oz sugar
- 3.5 oz flour
- 3.5 oz dark chocolate
- 4 tbsps vegetable oil
- 7 walnuts
- 1 tbsp raisins
- 3 tbsps candied orange peel (homemade)
- 1 tsp baking powder
- Half small glass rum
Tools
- Bowl
- Baking Sheets
- Cooling Rack
Steps
1. Soak the bread pieces in milk. The amount of milk might vary depending on how stale the bread is. Turn it occasionally.
Let it soften (I let it soak overnight for the reasons I mentioned in the introduction, but you can adjust as you see fit).2. Add sugar, rum, oil, candied peels, and raisins. I hadn’t planned on using raisins, but I found a bag of almost finished ones, so I used them. If you want to use more, you can do so freely.
3. Mix well with a spoon, possibly chopping any bread crust pieces that remain a bit harder.
4. Add flour (and baking powder) and mix.
Open parenthesis: it was at this point that I decided to make cookies, instead of the bread cake. Don’t ask me why, I just decided. And that’s why I added the baking powder, which is not foreseen in bread cake. Close parenthesis.
5. Melt the chocolate in the microwave for a couple of minutes, preferably with one or two interruptions to stir the chocolate. I recommend adding a teaspoon or two of water, it helps. You can also leave some chunks, the cookies (and the kids) will appreciate it. 😉
6. Pour the melted chocolate into the bread mixture and mix well to incorporate.
7. Shell and coarsely chop some walnuts and add them to the mixture.
8. Scoop the mixture with a spoon and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. They should resemble “ugly but good” type cookies.
9. Decorate (optional step) with a piece of walnut (be careful because walnuts tend to burn during baking, as can be seen from the photo below).
10. Bake in the oven at about 392 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes, then let cool on a rack, and then decorate with powdered sugar (or not).
With chocolate desserts, given the color, I always find it a bit difficult to gauge the browning, so at first, I thought I had left them a few minutes too long, as the walnuts on top had darkened. But in the end, the cooking time turned out excellent because they came out perfect: crispy on the outside and soft inside. Please adjust according to your oven and the size of the cookies.
These bread and chocolate cookies have the maximum fragrance a couple of hours after baking: the inside is so soft, I never would have believed stale bread could give such a result. My son widened his eyes when he tasted the first cookie (“mom! so good!).
I saved a part for this morning’s breakfast. My judgment on the preservation of these bread and chocolate cookies is this: stored in a tin box they remain soft and are excellent with milk coffee, but they lose their crunchy crust; stored open (that is, inside the oven, simply on a plate) they dry a bit and the exterior doesn’t soften, it hardens slightly. My husband preferred the latter.
I liked them all, yesterday and today, soft and not.
My kids said “Make them again”. 😀
Follow me!
on my Facebook page, on my Pinterest boards, in my two groups:
Catia’s group, in the kitchen and beyond and Exactly what I was looking for!
and if you want… subscribe to my Newsletter
and if you want… subscribe to my Newsletter
