How To Make Chocolate Cherry Cookies

We had dried cherries left after making lemon-cherry scones and wanted to make a cookie with them. Chocolate covered cherries are popular, so we decided they needed a chocolate cookie. We didn’t have a recipe handy, so we started with the sugar cookie recipe and swapped out some of the flour for cocoa.

First try, score.

Ingredients

1 pound butter (4 sticks)
3 cups flour, sifted
2 cups cocoa powder
2 eggs
1½ cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup dried cherries
raw sugar for topping (optional)

Directions

Start with cold butter and beat it until softened.

Add the flour, cocoa and eggs and beat, scraping down the sides a few times to make sure you get all the flour incorporated.

By the way, sometimes it’s really important what order things are mixed in. This recipe isn’t like that. You could just dump everything together and mix it, but if you do it’s hard to keep the flour from exploding out of the bowl when you turn on the mixer. So add a few things, mix, repeat. Now where were we? Ahh yes …

Add the sugar, vanilla, baking powder and salt and beat.

Finally, mix in the cherries.

Okay, I was wrong. It does matter, a little bit. Add the cherries at the end, or you’ll turn them to mush by the time everything else is mixed.

Now, start scooping the dough onto an un-greased baking sheet.

These aren’t going to spread as they bake, you you’ll probably want to press them down a little if you want normal cookie shapes.

Sprinkle with raw sugar if you want a little crispy topping.

Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes.

And that’s it.

PS: You can see we did one batch before we realized they wouldn’t spread.