Hello my loves,

This week I'm bringing you some vintage Rachel :). Yes, we’re harking back to 2018, when my flower crown was but a twinkle in my eye, to a recipe I created right around this time of year, and one that’s remained a perennial favourite ever since. Chewy and more-ish, these brown sugar cookies are piled high with golden grains of raw sugar, and spiked with a heady mix of spices that will waft tantalisingly through your home as they bake. There’s nothing like cranking up the oven as the weather cools down, and I know that as soon as autumn’s crispness starts to creep into the mornings, so too will the spice cabinet start to sing to me with her siren-song.

But there’s another reason I love these cookies so much. They’re a delicious way to experiment with tuning into your body, and letting it guide you to what will best nourish you on any given day. Yup, we’re talking intuitive eating here folks, a subject dear to my heart and something I’ve been practising in my own life for a number of years. If you’re not familiar with intuitive eating, essentially it’s about chucking out the food-and-diet rule book, along with anything anyone ever told you about food, from the media, to your mother, to your best friend’s sister’s aunt, and tuning inwards to understand what will best nourish you. Basically, you eat whatever you feel like eating, when you feel like eating it, and when you’re full you stop.

While you’re tripping through life riding high on your new-found food freedom, you also notice how food makes you feel. If something doesn’t make you feel good, you probably won’t feel like eating it, and so you probably don’t. For me, I know that too much raw fruit will always upset my stomach; and while I adore a sweet treat like these cookies, I know that one or two per munch-session is perfect for me - any more and a few hours later I’ll crash like a flying sugar monkey whose wings have been cruelly clipped. Cheese on the other hand, THAT I can eat alllll the damn day. In fact, I’ve learned that my body runs best on four core food groups: meat, carbs, vegetables and cheese. By contrast, the love of my life is a total fruit bat and happily munches through kilos of the stuff, alone, because raw fruit doesn’t feed me at all. My sister in law is mostly vegetarian with an occasional side of bacon, and dairy-free except for butter, which doesn't upset her body, and which she freely slathers on everything. My point is, no one else can go on this journey for you. The answer to what will truly feed you can’t be found outside yourself, in someone else's regimen. Your body is yours alone and only you can explore your relationship with it.

Anyways, back to the cookies! Because we live in a benevolent universe, we’ve been given a handy tool to help us tune in to what will best feed us. It’s your nose. Yes, your sense of smell is incredibly valuable when you’re learning how to listen to your body. And these cookies teach you how to use your sense of smell to create a spice mix that’s entirely yours, designed by you, for you, with much love from you. It’s really quite simple: you head to your spice cabinet, take out everything that could work in these cookies (there’s a list of suggestions in the recipe). Then unscrew the jars and have a total time smelling each one. If it smells good to you, in it goes! If it doesn’t, or you smell it and think ‘meh’, then that is not the spice for you today (although it might be the next time you make these cookies). You can tinker with your cookie batter as long as you like, adding spices and tasting your batter until you’ve concocted just the right mix (although beware the modern-world perfection tendency that may try to creep in - there is no right or wrong: they’re just cookies!). I use my snout extensively when I'm creating recipes - the aroma of a herb, spice or other ingredient will usually tell me whether it belongs in a dish, and tasting and testing as I go will tell me how much of it the dish wants to use. You can watch me do this in my brown sugar and spice cookie video here.

If you’re currently at home with small people, navigating long days and wondering how the heck you’re going to fill them, this is a fantastic way to gobble up a couple of hours. Also, kids are SO much more comfortable with their intuition than adults are, so this is super fun to do with them - they’ll probably teach you a thing or two! If your resources can stretch to it, you could even each make your own batch of dough. The dough will happily hang out in the fridge for a few days, so you could bake a few cookies from each of your batches at a time, popping a fresh tray in the oven every few days when your supply runs low.

So, happy baking my loves! You can find the written recipe here and recipe video here. May your home be filled with the comfort of cookies, and your heart be warmed by some baking self-love.

Love, Rachel xxx

PS If you'd like to learn more about intuitive eating, this gorgeous article by the amazing Jane de Graaf delves deep into my views xxx