Cornflake Cookies and Coconut Macaroons

Moving into a new apartment means that I have a new oven to negotiate. At first it didn't turn on, and after a long battle with our real estate agents we finally got an electrician to look at it. He fiddled with some knobs and now it half works. It's a rubbish 70s oven, with a non-digital clock that must have stopped working decades ago. There are only two settings - bake and rotisserie. One turns on the coils down the bottom and burns the bottom of your cakes to a crisp, the other turns on the top coils and kills the top while the rest of the oven stays cold. Oh and there's no fan. So I've tried to deal with this by switching between the top and bottom coils every 10 minutes or so in the hope that this will somehow lead to an evenly heated oven. INSANITY, I KNOW.

My poor workmates were the guinea pigs for my new-old oven experiments. The first was semi-disasterous but still tasted good thanks to the absolutely epic amount of butter in the recipe. I adapted this recipe for cornflake cookies and added sultanas to the cookie dough. I think the sultanas added some nice moisture and tartness to the cookies. My boss described them as "so awesome I'm going to have to report you to the awesome police".

Cornflake and Sultana Cookies

Experiment Number 2 was coconut macaroons. This is something so simple it doesn't even need a recipe - a bag of dessicated coconut, a tin of sweetened condensed milk and some glace cherries to decorate.

Coconut macaroons about to go into the oven

Thanks to my switching between coils trick these did not get as burnt on the bottoms as the cornflake sultana cookies and were gobbled up. My workmate then accused me of working for the AWWA (Anti-Weight-Watchers-Association).