Matchmaker chocolate orange cookies

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I bought a pack of orange flavour Matchmakers for Christmas and then forgot about them (I don’t know how that happened!). When I found them again the kids had been asking to do some cooking (I love how they are enjoying what we do for this blog as much as I am) and I thought they would taste good in a cookie instead of chocolate chips.

Cookies are very easy to make – they were the first recipe that I wrote down in my battered old recipe book and the first thing I ever cooked with Will, when Jess and Vic were napping as babies one day. It was after making them that I first came up with the idea for this blog (although it took three more years and one more baby for me to get round to doing anything about it 😂).

My usual recipe for cookies is a good one but they always turned out with a texture like a scone or rock cake. Tasty but not what I wanted for these. So I did a bit of reading up on how to make different types of cookies. I found that to get a softer, chewier cookie I should be using brown sugar instead of granulated (I used soft brown sugar for this recipe) and I should melt the margarine before mixing it with the flour, to help the sticky gluten in the flour to develop (another suggestion was to add an extra egg but we didn’t try that one). The results – the best cookies I’ve ever made! They were thicker than shop bought cookies, and less chewy than they can be but that was fine for me, I’ll definitely be using this recipe from now on.

I’m putting together a Pintrest board of cooking tips like the ones above. If you’re interested you can find it here. Don’t forget to follow me, I’ll be adding new pins regularly.

We made 6 huge cookies with this recipe. It would make around 10 more reasonably sized ones 😊.

Ingredients

Makes 10 cookies

• 75g margarine
• 1 large egg
• 150g plain flour
• 100g soft brown sugar
• 25g cocoa powder
• 50g orange Matchmakers

Method

1. Heat your oven to 180°C and line two baking trays with greaseproof paper.
2. Seive the flour, sugar and cocoa powder into a mixing bowl.
3. Weigh out the Matchmakers and break them into small chunks. Add them to the mixing bowl.
4. Measure the margarine into a microwavable bowl and heat for 10-20 seconds then stir. Do this again until it has melted.
5. Add the melted margarine, and then an egg, into the mixing bowl and mix well with a wooden spoon.
   

   
6. Scoop spoonfuls of the mixture onto the greaseproof paper and flatten slightly with the back of the spoon. Shape them now if you want round cookies (we didn’t bother).
7. Cook for 15-20 minutes until your kitchen smells lovely and the cookies are slightly firm to touch.
   

   
8. Use a spatula to loosen the cookies from the greaseproof paper (the Matchmakers stuck to the paper slightly) and leave them to cool on a cooling rack.
9. If you’re not going to eat them right away store them in an airtight container or wrap them in tin foil.