Welcome to Bookish Recipes, a new feature on the blog where I will cook or bake a recipe from a book I have loved and share the result with you. For my first Bookish Recipe, I have chosen Fortune Cookies from The Year of Taking Chances by Lucy Diamond. It is a fantastic story about three women who meet on New Year's Eve and start a friendship over some cocktails and fortune cookies. From that moment, their lives start changing and they have to face some big challenges and decisions. I highly recommend it.
Plus, at the end of the book there are some extras and one of them is the recipe for the fortune cookies. Here is my own version of the recipe:
1) Preheat the oven to 170ºC/325ºF. Line a baking tray with oven paper.
2) Combine the flour with the sugar and the salt in a bowl. Pour in the oil, egg whites, water and vanilla extract and then stir everything together until well mixed.
3) Place tablespoonfuls of the mixture and use the back of a metal spoon to swirl out the mixture into 10cm/4in circles (well, try to, it's no that easy). I placed 4 cookies and made two batches, so you'll get 8 cookies in total.
4) Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. The outer edge of each cookie should turn golden brown and the cookies should be easy to remove with a spatula (or with your fingers if you don't mind getting burnt, which apparently I don't...).
5) While the cookies are in the oven, you can write the fortunes (or download them from the Internet, you know, as 21st-century people do). I cut 6 x 1cm papers and wrote a selection of fortunes, from the cheesy usual ones (pic 1) to the joke ones (pic 2). I also wrote one especially for my BF and one for me, because, I am writing them so I decide our future (pic 3).
6) Don't forget the cookies! Once they are out of the oven, you must be quick. Put the fortune inside, fold the cookie in half and pinch the edges together. Then fold again in half to create the famous shape of the cookies.
7) Let them cool and then, enjoy!
About the Book:
Author: Lucy Diamond
Published: January 1st 2015 by Pan
Amazon | Amazon UK
Blurb: It's New Year's Eve, and Gemma and Spencer Bailey are throwing a house party. There's music, dancing, champagne and all their best friends under one roof. It's going to be a night to remember.
Also at the party is Caitlin, who has returned to the village to pack up her much-missed mum's house and to figure out what to do with her life; and Saffron, a PR executive who's keeping a secret which no amount of spin can change. The three women bond over Gemma's dodgy cocktails and fortune cookies, and vow to make this year their best one yet.
But as the following months unfold, Gemma, Saffron and Caitlin find themselves tested to their limits by shocking new developments. Family, love, work, home - all the things they've taken for granted - are thrown into disarray. Under pressure, they are each forced to rethink their lives and start over. But dare they take a chance on something new?
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