Having baked pretty much every other day for the last two weeks, I decided to return to the old faithful of cookies.

I found a few recipes for chocolate chip cookies, or American style cookies, and decided to combine them into two different flavours, with varied results.

The base mixture was the same for both of them – butter, caster sugar, brown sugar, an egg, an egg yolk, 2 tsp vanilla – with one batch containing just flour and bicarb, and the other a combination of bicarb, flour and cocoa powder.

I made them for my room at work, and one of my colleagues is allergic to nuts, so I made some cookies with smarties, and the others with peanut m&ms.

The idea was that the dough was quite dry, and that balls would be rolled by hand then torn in two and stacked on top of each other, creating towering biscuits that melted into themselves in the oven, creating thick, gooey-centred cookies.

Mine just went mental once they hit the heat and spread out all over the shop, which meant they were delicious, but pretty flat, making the stacking process a bit of a waste of time. Having read the comments on all three recipes online, a lot of people had the same problem (and their dough was also much wetter than the original bakers’ – much like mine which required lots of extra flour to be able to be handled) and had popped their dough in the fridge to set a bit before shaping and baking. Something to remember next time.

The recipes I took inspiration from are this one, this one and this one, although they’re essentially all exactly the same.