Boredom Baking

    I had no reason to bake today, except that my friend Elena made me a copy of a recipe from a Martha Stewart magazine in the staff room yesterday that I thought I'd try.  We finally shoveled out from yet another snow storm and another snow day.  My parents picked me up for a much needed outing to the grocery store.  Have you ever been in the grocery store trying to remember a recipe and what you might need?  That's how I found myself today.  I was trying to visualize the recipe and the only ingredient I thought I needed was dried cherries, but I neglected to remember that I was out of dark chocolate chips.  Improvise!

Cherry Chocolate Chunk Cookies 

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup old fashion oats
1 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup milk chocolate chips
1/2 cup white chocolate chips

Method

1.Preheat Oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine flour, baking soda, and salt.
3. Mix butter, brown and white sugar until light and fluffy.  Next add the egg and vanilla and mix together.
4.  Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture.  Mix until well blended.  Then add the oats, cherries, and chocolate chips.
5.  Use an ice cream scoop (2 inches) to place batter on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper.  Each cookie should be about 2 inches apart.
6. Bake for 13-14 minutes.  Turn the cookie trays half way through the baking time.
7.  Cool on wire racks.

This recipe made 25 LARGE cookies.

The Taste Test
    The original recipe called for 4.5 oz of dark chocolate coarsely chopped.  I didn't have that or semi sweet chips to I decided to mix milk chocolate and white chocolate chips.  I've never had dried cherries before.  They are similar to dried cranberries only a little more tart.  These cookies came out pretty big, so the spacing is important. 
   I sampled a broken cookie and they were very buttery and delicious, not much different than a regular chocolate chip cookie.  While these babies were baking I decided I would package them up and give them to our custodians at school tomorrow.  They deserve them with all the snow shoveling they have been doing.  Random baking turned random act of kindness.