Love Bars

 

I know that our sense of smell is supposed to be the sense most strongly linked to memory, but I think you'll all agree that certain foods can act as little time machines, zooming us back to a time and place buried in the past. Love Bars, which are sold at Pret A Manger (a sandwich chain in the UK that sells really tasty to-go meals), have this time machine effect on me; one bite and I'm back on the slow train to Chelmsford, eating my lunch after a long morning in the library. The ironic thing is that I would've been in the library researching nostalgia - the subject of my thesis - and now I'm waxing nostalgic about the delicious treats I enjoyed after studying (...and before studying, and during studying).

Keep reading »

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

There are few things better in this world than a really, really good chocolate chip cookie. Everything about them, from the dough (not ashamed to admit I eat it!), to the smell of them baking in the oven, is classic and comforting and delicious. And biting into a chocolate chip cookie warm from the oven... that's pretty hard to top in terms of heart-melting goodness.

My mom has used the same chocolate chip cookie recipe for years (scrawled on a piece of loose leaf by a co-worker) and I've adopted it as my gold standard cookie recipe. But recently I was listening to the chocolate chip cookie episode of my favourite food podcast, Spilled Milk, and they brought something to light that I didn't know before: chilling the dough for at least 24 hours will result in much, much better cookies. Chilling the dough, they explained, allows the sugars to get completely absorbed by the liquids, and the cookies turn out soft and chewy with a richer flavour - kind of toffee-like. Apparently, even the original Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie recipe called for chilling the dough overnight - a step that for some reason has been left out of the famous package instructions. 

Keep reading »