Coffee Kisses

With a name like Coffee Kisses, how can you not make these biscuits? 

With all the sandwiched baked goods - macarons, whoopie pies, homemade oreos etc - flying around, I thought I would add another contender into the mix. I found these while flicking through the Biscuits and Cookies section of the wonderful Leiths Baking Bible and had to make one of the three varieties - Coffee, Chocolate and Lime. I've been meaning to do more baking with coffee so I plumped for these (though I have to admit, Chocolate Kisses sound incredibly seductive...)

It really felt like spring last week. It was sunny and warm, the snow was melting, the house was full of flowers. It really felt like you could smell spring on the air. But then it suddenly started snowing and the temperature dropped and voila, it's winter again. It's quite an odd feeling. We do still have the lovely flowers - like these beautiful tulips. It also means we get to ski powder again!

These felt like a great 'spring' biscuit. They're not to heavy and filling as I desire my baked goods to be in the winter and not too light and airy as I desire them to be in summer. The biscuits are light and crumbly yet fairly solid - they're small but you can actually tell you've eaten something (if that makes sense!). The buttercream is creamy and slightly tangy - and for once, it's a buttercream that's not too sweet. 

As per usual, I substituted some soft brown sugar into the mix. I also added a little cocoa into the buttercream too for a bit of mocha appeal and a tablespoon of creme fraiche for a bit of tanginess. I took out some of the icing sugar, too. I'm glad I made my changes - it was really tasty. I may or may not have eaten several spoonfuls while filling them...

The biscuits themselves are very nice on their own - tender and crumbly with a delicate coffee flavour. With the buttercream, they really shine. 

I got a bit overexcited and decided to pipe kisses in their 'xx' format onto the biscuits. I think they're quite cute, but perhaps a little too much... I also liked the idea of giving one (or more!) in a little box for someone special. Piped kiss on top totally optional!

Here's to kisses, coffee and otherwise!

Recipe removed as I no longer trust it to work perfectly for you.

Ben's Cookies

One of the biggest culinary highlights of Oxford - at least as far as I'm concerned - is Ben's Cookies. They're incredible. You get them from the tiny little hatch shop in the Covered Market, bold in red and white and decorated with the fabulous Quentin Blake's special illustrations for them. (Anybody else grow up with Roald Dahl's books and Quentin's illustrations?) They bake the cookies on site and sell them either by weight and then popped in their infamous paper bags or in tins of six or ten. You can get a glass of milk or filter coffee too. They don't confuse it by adding or baking anything else: it's all about the cookies.

The Covered Market is one of my favourite places in Oxford. It's a little complex of shops, cafes, butchers, grocers, florists, cobblers, milliners, delis, sandwich shops, jewellers, pet shops, everything you can think of, all clustered under the vaulted pink roof of the market. I love the way it has all the individual shops - not like the big supermarkets of today - in their tiny little premises. They actually focus on what they're selling and do it brilliantly - as individuals rather than corporations - which gives it so much character.

Often twinned with Ben's Cookies is Moo-Moo's, which you can see in the photo below. It's a milkshake and smoothie hatch, and sells literally every milkshake flavour you could think of - any cake, sweet, biscuit, cookie etc will be on their menu. I think they have over 200 stable flavours and there's always specials on. In college people tend to either be Ben's or Moo-Moo's fanatics - it's a it of a split camp. Though I'm firmly with Ben, Moo-Moo's definitely have their sweet, sweet charm...

From their little hatch, Ben's sell twelve flavours of cookie. White, Milk and Dark Chocolate Chip. Double chocolate chip (chocolate dough and milk chips). Triple chocolate chip (chocolate dough and white and dark chips). Milk chocolate and Orange. Raisin and Oatmeal. Dark chocolate chip and Ginger. Fruit and Nut with Dark chocolate chips. Dark chocolate chip and Nut. And my favourite, my eternal order, the one some of the assistants give me without asking, the model of these portraits... Double and Nut.


These are not just any cookies. They take melt in the mouth to another level entirely. Always perfectly just undercooked, squidgy, yet crisp on the outside. They're often hot from the oven, the chocolate melted, oozing out. In winter I constantly got freezing fingers from eating the cookie hot out of it's iconic paper bag, getting chocolate all over them and having to lick it off. Often they ooze onto the sides of the bag as you break bits off. Double and Nut won my heart with it's dark, intense chocolate flavour, with plenty of muscovado in the depths, and a nutty overtone in the dough, the dark chocolate lacing it, chunks not feeble chips, and the beautifully toasted walnut on top, finishing a masterpiece.

This week I got an early birthday present - a new digital SLR! So I am now the proud owner of a Sony alpha A350 - and it's pretty damn fabulous. I'm only really starting out on taking my photography seriously - I've got so much to learn - but it's amazing to have the scope for so much improvement and to learn with a real camera rather than my phone or mum's point and shoot! These photos for this post were the first things I took after getting the hang of the camera, and I hope I've done Ben's Cookies justice - I'm pretty happy with the results. Yet I know I'll be looking back in a few weeks thinking I could do so much better now, but then that's the brilliance of learning.

Next post - my attempt to alleviate my withdrawal symptoms from Ben's in the holidays by baking cookies. I can't promise they're like Ben's - still working on that! - but they're pretty lovely and mean I'll finally be writing another recipe...