{TWD} Chockablock Cookies

This week the Tuesdays With Dorie baking group takes us back into cookie territory as we bake Chockablock Cookies. One thing I've learned as we've baked through Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking: From My Home to Yours is that I love her simple recipes, evidenced by the recipe I chose when it was my turn, the Swedish Visiting Cake. So I approached this week's cookie with a bit of apprehension. Dorie calls these cookies "chockablock" because they are stuffed full of stir-ins, all held together with a molasses-rich cookie dough. Molasses is one of my very favorite ingredients, and Dorie has some pretty wonderful plain molasses cookies that we baked back in November. I had to wonder if in these cookies the molasses would be just one flavor competing with the other "chockablock" items: nuts, dried fruit, coconut and chocolate.

n.o.e.'s notes:

- Mary of Popsicles and Sandy Feet chose these cookies, and you can find the recipe on her site, or on page 86 of Dorie's book.

- I made 1/3 recipe which yielded 13 cookies.

- There's a lot of flexibility in this recipe - nuts of choice (I used pecans), dried fruit of choice (mixture of currants and golden raisins for me), coconut (toasted), and chocolate pieces.

- I adore the taste of molasses, but didn't enjoyed the molasses/chocolate combination in the Chocolate Gingerbread we baked for TWD, so I left out the chocolate from my cookie dough. Once I'd formed the cookies I studded two of them with a few Ghiradelli 58% chocolate chips.

- The dough is interesting because even though there is molasses, there aren't any of the "usual suspects" in terms of spices that often accompany molasses in baked goods.

- Rather than the recipe's proportion of 1/2 butter and 1/2 shortening, I used 1/3 shortening, 2/3 butter.

- My cookies spread and flattened just the right amount and were perfectly baked in 13 minutes, 30 seconds.


the verdict:

My husband and I both enjoyed the non-chocolate cookies - they were filled with textures and tastes. The cookies had nice soft interiors, chewy but tender, and pleasantly molasses-y. Rather than competing with the fruit and nut flavors, the molasses pulled them all together. I'm taking a wild guess and saying that absent the influence of "Christmas spices," the molasses became a true team player.

As for the cookies with the chocolate chips: I could eat my words, but I'd much rather eat the cookies! I enjoyed the full chockablock experience - fruit, nuts, coconut, and chocolate were all very good together. I give the credit to the molasses. And the relatively mild chocolate. I'm glad I didn't use darker chocolate, because the mellowness of this chocolate helped it fit in with the (many) other flavors.