Chocolate Cherry Oatmeal Cookies

Warm cookies. Right out of the oven. Is there anything better?

Nope.

Warm Chocolate Cherrry Oatmeal Cookies. Yes please.

By the way, these cookies were a complete accident. A delicious accident. My friend Jen (who can bake without measuring or using a recipe — how, I do not know), makes fabulous cookies that are so huge that we call them Monster Cookies.

They have chocolate chips, dried cherries, oatmeal, coconut….all things featured in my cookies. So, without knowing her actual recipe (and honestly, she probably doesn’t have one…yes, she’s that good…it’s sick…in a delicious kind of way) I set out to make my own Monster Cookies.

Her cookies are thick and round mine were flat and chewy. Oh well, one delicious mistake that I’ll take. These cookies are soft and moist. So let’s just keep it between you and me that they were totally not what I was going for.

Here’s what you need: 

Butter, Flour, Brown Sugar, Eggs, Baking Soda, Salt, Vanilla, Chocolate Chips, Oats, Dried Cherries, and Shredded Coconut.

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Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Before you start baking, take the butter out of the refrigerator for a couple of hours to allow it to become soft and room temperature.

I know that recipes always say this and for a long time I would skimp on this step and have semi-soft-sort of still- cool butter. Trust the Chief Idiot here….really soft butter make a HUGE difference in baking.

Blend 2 sticks of nice soft, room temperature butter with 1 cup of brown sugar. Mix them together either with a mixer or with your very strong muscles until they are not only combined but also light and fluffy.

Add 2 eggs and 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Please use real, pure vanilla extract and not vanilla flavored extract.

Mix the eggs into the ingredients until combined and smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine 2 cups of flour with 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

I like to give the dry ingredients a quick whisk to be sure that the ingredients are all thoroughly combined. This helps to be sure that the baking powder, which helps the cookies rise, is evenly distributed throughout the cookies and not in a big clump.

With the mixer on the lowest speed, SLOWLY add the flour a little at a time and mix just until the flour and other ingredients are combined. Don’t over mix.

I love the whirling mixer action shots.

Save a little flour in the bottom of the bowl and mix in 1 cup of dried cherries. This will keep the cherries from sticking together and clumping in the bottom of your mixer.

Add the flour covered cherries to the batter. Also add about 1 cup of dark chocolate chips. I like those big Ghirardelli Chips but any good chocolate will do the trick. I used about 3/4 of the bag…not counting the ones I ate while making these cookies.

Add 1/2 cup of shredded coconut.

I’ll admit, I’m not much of a coconut eater but I love it in cookies. It helps to keep them moist and also adds nice texture. There is no overwhelming coconut flavor and I’m betting that if you hadn’t seen me add the coconut, you wouldn’t really know it was in there. Do not fear the coconut.

Add 1 cup of oats….Old Fashioned Oatmeal Oats…and mix everything together.

Spoon the cookie dough out onto baking trays. Be sure to leave space between the cookie dough blobs to let them spread out during baking.

I’ve been experimenting lately with baking my cookies on either parchment paper (above) or a Silpat Liner (below).

To be honest, I’m really loving the way the cookies bake on the parchment paper. Another plus is that parchment is cheap and available at every grocery store near the aluminum foil and plastic wrap. It keeps the cookies from sticking, protects the bottoms from getting too brown, and makes clean up a snap.

Bake at 375 for 10-12 minutes.

 

C is for Cookies. And Chocolate. And Cherries.

Oh, and since these contain both fruit and oatmeal, I think it’s perfectly fine to eat them for breakfast.

Here’s the recipe:

Chocolate Cherry Oatmeal Cookies

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