Malted Milk Cookies with Chunks of Dark Chocolate and Malteser Smashings

Lately, I've been obsessively reading through the archives of many many food blogs. My latest read is Ange's blog, Vicious Ange. Like me, Ange loves recipes by Bill Granger and Nigella Lawson, and her lovely pictures remind me how many recipes I still want to try.

One recipe in particular caught my eye and I could not wait to try it. My favourite chocolate is Maltesers. I love their light malty crunch. I also love Ovaltine or Horlicks in warm milk. I had never really thought to adapt the malty goodness of Maltesers and Ovaltine to baking, so when I saw these Malted Milk Cookies with Chunks of Dark Chocolate, my eyes lit up. I'm still a little unsteady, so baking has to be done in stages. Luckily, the recipe is nice and simple and can be made in one bowl, or the bowl of the mixer to minimise the dishes.

The only tricky thing is the chocolate and Malteser chunks. I am not a big fan of large chocolate chunks in my cookies, I much prefer a smaller more well-distributed chocolate chip. This meant that my larger Lindt dark chocolate buttons needed to be broken up. I have had bad experiences trying to beat chocolate into submission in a plastic bag, so I tried to break them up in a mortar and pestle. That didn't work either, so I gave up and blitzed chocolate and Maltesers together in my mini food processor. I pulsed them until I had a nice sandy texture with small pebble sized chunks of chocolate, which is the perfect size for me.

I only had 110g of dark chocolate instead of the 200g required by the recipe, but I definately didn't feel that the extra 90g were needed. I used heaped teaspoon sized scoops of dough and they made large biscuits. These tend to spread quite a bit. I like chewy biscuits, so I cooked them for the minimum cooking time and found that these had a lovely crispy outside and a beautifully chewy interior.

I couldn't be happier with how these biscuits turned out. They are absolutely amazing. If you would like to try them for yourself (and you should), see the recipe here at Vicious Ange.