New Recipe

On Saturday, I went and visited with my good friends the Simciks.  As I often do, I brought some baked goods to share.  My sister Margot had suggested cookies with white chocolate chips and dried cranberries as a fun fall flavor, so I looked for such a recipe online.  I decided to go with this one, though I left out the macadamia nuts since I think of that as more of a summer flavor.

While the Simciks were very appreciative of the cookies, I wasn't terribly happy with how they turned out.  There was too much sugar, with nothing to cut through the sweetness but some also sweetened cranberries.  Lori is a very skilled baker (her first job was working in a bakery while she was still in high school), so she asked me some questions about the recipe and what I wanted from it when I baked the cookies.  As we talked through some changes, I realized that we were making an all new cookie recipe.  While it's not exactly from scratch (we used the first one as our starting point), it's its own thing.  Here's what we came up with:

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 baking soda
1/4 salt
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp orange zest
1 egg
1 tbsp vanilla
1 tbsp milk
1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup dried cranberries
3/4 cup white chocolate chips
3/4 cup chopped pecans

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt and set aside. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugars. Mix in the zest, egg, vanilla, and milk. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and combine. Stir in the oats. Add the cranberries, white chocolate chips, and pecans and stir to combine.

Line cookie sheets with parchment paper and, using a cookie dough scoop, drop the dough on the sheets. Bake for 15-17 minutes or until golden brown. Let the cookies cool on the cookies sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an air tight container.

I haven't had a chance to try the recipe yet, but I'm really excited to.  I've got an office luncheon on Thursday, so I'll let you know on Friday how things turned out.