Tropical Chocolate Cookies

With the spectacular failure of the cake which was meant to be my entry to this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, a busy weekend ahead, and a holiday at the end of the month, I've had to amalgamate two baking challenges in order to get them done.

These Tropical Chocolate Cookies, flavoured with cocoa, vanilla, dried mango, flaked coconut and glacé ginger, are going into both the We Should Cocoa challenge (to pair chocolate and mango) and the Tea Time Treats challenge, which is to bake biscuits and cookies for tea this month.

These aren't dainty biscuits for a posh tea party, but hunky, chunky, chewy-centred cookies, for when you're sitting with a mug of tea and feeling guilty about watching day-time TV, or for handing out to the builders working in the yard as they take their umpteenth tea-break.  But they are still a treat for whatever sort of tea-time you have!

As FB was visiting again, and would be taking some home, I used my oil-based recipe from Cookie Madness. I substituted 25g of the flour with cocoa and added 30g flaked coconut, 80g chopped dried mango and 15g glace ginger, (which was in very small pieces) instead of the nuts and chocolate chips in the recipe. The total weight of additions to the basic dough was the same in both cases.

Despite the strong flavours of each individual ingredient, these cookies were quite subtly flavoured - everything seemed to blend together to give an overall flavour which was quite delicate, with nothing being dominant. The mango and coconut flakes made the texture quite chewy too. All in all, these were very good - although they could probably have been improved by adding a handful of chocolate chunks!

We Should Cocoa is a baking challenge started by Chele from Chocolate Teapot, and Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog. Each month a different ingredient is chosen to be paired with some form of chocolate in our cooking.  This month the choice of mango was made by guest host Shaheen of Allotment to Kitchen, who will be posting a round-up at the end of the month.

Tea Time Treats is a monthly challenge co-hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, and Kate at What Kate Baked. Karen chose this month's theme of cookies and biscuits. The name of the challenge is self explanatory, but more details can be found here.

What might have been

This was on course to being a spectacular cake, and a worthy entrant for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, which is to pair chocolate and mango in the same dish. That was, until it stuck in the bundt tin. The relics of the cake were very crumbly too, so I think my adaptations may have destabilised the recipe.

I was a little concerned about the low number of eggs in this recipe I found for Whole Orange Bundt Cake with Chocolate Ganache, as cake batter recipe of this size would normally have a minimum of 6 eggs, rather than the three used here, but assumed the puréed oranges would make up for this. As it turned out, I had to add milk to the batter to give a dropping consistency and allow all the flour to be incorporated.  My mini-chopper didn't purée the oranges to a smooth liquid, either - it was a coarse paste with little pieces of peel still visible, which I thought would add to the visual appeal of the cake. These factors combined with the addition of 100g of dried fruit may have meant the cake batter was still too dry if the fruit absorbed some of the moisture during cooking. This could explain the cake being very crumbly, and being in a bundt tin only made that problem seem more obvious, as it was easier for the cake to pull apart than be released properly from the tin.

The only reason I'm bothering to write up the cake is that it had a wonderful flavour. I added 60g dried chopped mango, 50g dried chopped mandarins and 100g chopped 74% chocolate to the basic recipe. The puréed raw orange gave the cake a fresh taste and the little pieces of dried fruit added texture and intense fruit flavours which married well with the chocolate.

Obviously I didn't waste chocolate ganache on the ruins of the cake, but had it been more successful, I think I would have added some sort of chocolate frosting to increase the chocolate hit.

This is a fantastic combination of flavours which I will carry on working with, together with the concept of using puréed raw orange in the cake for a fresh, strong flavour. Watch this blog!