I have a sweet tooth. And I have a particularly soft spot for freshly baked cookies. Fortunately, I also have a great way to deal with this. If you open my freezer, you will find a handful of resealable freezer bags filled with cookie dough balls that are labeled with what kind of cookie dough lies within, how to bake them, and the date they were frozen. Now, when the mood strikes, I can have cookies fresh out of the oven in less than half an hour! And with these Cherry Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies, the mood strikes often!
When baking cookies, be very careful about tweaking any recipes. For this one, keep your changes limited to swapping dried cherries for other dried fruit of similar sizes, using chocolate chips or other flavors of baking chunks/chips, and that's basically it. Trust me, if you like chocolate and cherries and oatmeal cookies, these are going to check all the boxes for you!
I love these cookies warm with coffee or tea. That said, I recently nestled a scoop of chocolate-cherry ice cream between two for the most wonderful ice cream sandwich I think I've ever had. So … be creative and enjoy these amazing cookies whenever the mood strikes.
Cherry Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 ¼ cups dried cherries
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
- 1 cup dark brown sugar
- ½ cup white sugar
- 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 tablespoon cornstarch
- 3 cup rolled oats
- 8 ounces dark chocolate chunks
In a medium-sized bowl, beat the eggs. Then, mix in the vanilla extract and the dried cherries. Allow the mixture to sit for an hour.
In a large bowl, use a hand mixer to beat together the butter and sugars until fluffy. Add in the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, kosher salt, and cornstarch, and continue to whisk until well-distributed and crumbs form. Pour in the egg and cherry mixture, oats, and chocolate. Mix until well-combined, ensuring no large, dry chunks remain.
Roll about ¼ cup's worth of the dough between your hands to form balls just slightly larger than a golf ball. At this point, you can freeze the cookie dough balls on a plastic sheet or plate and pop them into a freezer bag labeled with the type of cookie and baking instructions or continue on and bake them all.
When you are ready to bake some cookies, preheat the oven to 350°F. Place 6 cookie dough balls on a baking sheet at a time, evenly spaced. Bake for 14 minutes, then press the tops lightly with a spatula to flatten them slightly. Continue to bake until beginning to crisp around the edges, about 4-6 more minutes. The cookies should still be very soft when you remove them from the oven.
Allow the cookies to cool and firm up on the first baking sheet as you put the next batch of cookies into the oven on your second baking sheet. When the second batch of cookies comes out, remove the first batch of cooled cookies from their baking sheet and repeat until all of the cookies have been baked.
- Yields:24 cookies
- Preparation Time: 75 minutes (including resting time) to make the cookie dough balls; Baking takes an additional 20 minutes per batch