We recently had our annual cooking competition at work. The theme this year? Anything with chocolate in.

When pondering what I should do, I was reminded of a simple but tasty recipe I hadn’t made for many years. So here it is.

Ingredients

  • 1 x 397g can of condensed milk
  • 340g smooth peanut butter
  • 150g choc chips
  • 75g sultanas

Method

  1. Mix the condensed milk and peanut butter together.
  2. Mix in choc chips and sultanas.
  3. Place spoonfuls of the mixture on trays and flatten.
  4. Cook at 190°C till golden (10 - 15 minutes).

Commentary

I don’t know where I got this recipe, but I saw it shortly after I moved out of home. It looked simple and fun, so I tried it and liked it. Then one time I took a batch along to a religious function. One of my co-religionists who was gluten free liked them, so I made them for other functions as a simple gluten free option.*

I probably haven’t made the recipe since I left the religion, so perhaps not for a decade. In fact, my cooking (such as it was) was one of the things that fell by the wayside when I left religion. That wasn’t necessarily a conscious choice: I’d already had my few years after moving out of trying new recipes and cooking techniques I’d never tried before, I was filling my life with other things, and (admit it!) I was lazy. So any kind of serious cooking was rarer after I left religion, and I think rarer again post-Covid.

What was more deliberate was choosing not to cook desserts, cookies, and other sweet foods. One of the things the religion had provided was opportunities to try out new recipes without ending up eating them all myself. I eat enough sweet food already without adding another source of it.

So here was my entry to the cooking competition:

A plate of cookies

I didn’t try for the “most decorative” prize, which was fortunate, since I certainly wouldn’t have won it. But the cookies seemed to be liked, and they certainly all got eaten.

There had been talk of a “most creative use of chocolate” prize, so I suggested cheddarmite** scrolls dusted with cocoa. But of course I wasn’t intending to do it. [I have actually made cheddarmite pin-wheels for a previous cooking competition - but that year the theme was “savoury”, and I guarantee the pin-wheels weren’t chocolate themed…].

So there it is. It’s probably neither the cheapest nor the best choc-chip cookie recipe around. But it’s simple to do, and after a decade I’ve been reminded how much I like it.

* A co-worker pointed out that that most store-bought peanut butter won’t claim to be gluten free. Perhaps in practice it is, perhaps it isn’t. I never considered that.

** For non-Australian readers, “Cheddarmite” means cheese and Vegemite. It’s a really good flavour combination. I may not make Cheddarmite scrolls, pinwheels etc. very often, but I’d typically have a cheese and Vegemite sandwich at least once a week.