Coming up with a cookie to use some unusual baking chips...

We ended up with 9 new recipes for us this week - our favorites this round were the Maple Walnut Cake, Fresh Pea and Edamame Risotto with Fresh Mozzarella and Prosciutto and the delicious Strawberry-Chocolate Tart. The next few days are going to be mostly trying to play catch-up on recipes we've made that I have just not gotten a chance to post about yet. We'll start out today with a cookie recipe I made earlier in the week that I put together to use up a special kind of flavored baking chip that has been giving me the evil eye every time I open the pantry door.

I was given these cherry-flavored chips quite some time ago, but didn't have a clue what I was going to do with them. I thought I would pair them with some chopped bittersweet chocolate in a cookie recipe that's been floating around in my head aching to be made. I wanted a sturdy cookie that had a hearty chew to them with a crisp ring around the outside. I used a combination of butter and shortening and threw in a couple handfuls of old-fashioned rolled oats to hopefully get my desired texture in these Chocolate-Cherry Chip Oatmeal Cookies. Adding to the chewiness is a cup of light brown sugar which also gave some needed moisture to the finished cookie. The dark molten pools of chocolate in the cookie came from a big chunk of bittersweet chocolate I had in the pantry with the red-hot colored spots being the cherry-flavored chips.

I may have a tweak here or there to do still, but these are just what I hoped they would be - Jeff's first words after taking a bite were "Mmm... chewy-goodness!". The cherry flavor was certainly a fun addition, if not a bit artificial tasting - but I don't think you could expect much else from that kind of flavored "baking chip". After a day or so, they did loose a bit of their crispness, but their dense-chewy texture held up quite nice... even after freezing.

Recipes
Chocolate-Cherry Chip Oatmeal Cookies