Chocolate Covered Cherry Cookies - Holiday Bake Along
The joy of creation can result from doing beautiful needlework, creating a lovely quilt or simply baking and cooking delicious treats for your loved ones!
Professionals from the Quilting and Needlework Industries have joined together to share their holiday memories, a glimpse into their businesses, and MANY irresistible recipes!
Please visit ILoveToBake.com and ILovetoBakeCookies.com for more fabulous holiday creations!
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Needlework and Quilting Pros |
| TheArmchairChef.com CHOCOLATE COVERED CHERRY COOKIES |
| For the past 20 years, my best friends and I have gotten together during the first full weekend in December for our annual Great Cookie Bake! For 3 days solid, we eat, talk, laugh, and of course, BAKE *enormous* amounts of cookies. We bake so many cookies, in fact, that we now have a database containing our recipe ingredients and number of batches baked. We’re quite productive, considering there are only 4 of us baking! (To give you an idea, for the 2005 bake, we made 26 varieties, which required about 13 lbs. butter, 5 dozen eggs, and about 20 lbs. of flour!) About a month before the Bake, we get together and decide which cookies we feel like baking this time around, who will be bringing how much of what ingredients. Then we converge on the host’s house at the appointed time and the Games begin! For many years, we rotated between our three homes…then one of our group bought a new house with 2 wall ovens… talk about heaven for cookie baking! We have a great time getting together; the baking part is really just an excuse to do it! We give most of the finished product away as gifts.
There are several types we simply *must* make every year, as people are disappointed if we don’t! Chocolate Covered Cherry Cookies have to be one of the all-time favorites. |
| Ingredients |
| Cookies:1-1/2 cups flour 1/2 cup cocoa 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla 1 cup maraschino cherries, cut in half |
| Glaze: (melt together) 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 1/2 can sweetened condensed milk 3-1/2 teaspoons cherry juice |
| Step by Step |
| CookiesPreheat oven to 325 F 1) Mix cookie ingredients together. 2) The dough will mix easier if the butter is melted. 3) Do not chill the dough. 4) Form into 1″ balls, place on parchment paper-covered cookie sheet. 5) Make a deep depression with thumb in the center of each ball, and place a cherry half in the thumbprint. 6) Cover cherry and make sure to seal with the glaze. 7) Bake for @ 10 minutes. Cookies will be very soft right out of the oven; allow to cool for 2 to 3 minutes before removing from sheet. |
| GlazingThese cookies are tricky at first, but well worth the effort! 1) Make sure the glaze isn’t too thin… microwave only long enough to melt the chips. 2) The cookies turn out better if the depression in the middle of the cookie is uniform. 3) Try not to smash the cookie out; if you can make the depression deep and keep the cookie as close to ball form as possible, they won’t spread so much while baking. 4) As always, try to make all of the cookies on the same sheet as close to the same size as possible so they all cook to the same degree of done-ness! 5) One final tip: if you’re using dark cookie sheets, you may want to lower the temperature of your oven by 10 to 15 degrees as the cookies tend to get very dark on the bottom very quickly. 6) Using parchment paper will help keep them from getting too dark, and will make clean up a snap! |
| TW Designworks |
| TW Designworks: Specializing in fantasy-inspired counted cross stitch designs, sold through fine needlework retailers and via PatternsOnLine.com. Also now offering fine art prints and original artwork by Teresa Wentzler, sold consumer-direct via the TW Designworks website. Sign up for the TW Art Newsletter to stay updated about what’s new! Visit Artistic License, my blog, for glimpses into the life of the artist/designer. And visit the Teresa Wentzler Bulletin Board to network with other needlework enthusiasts. Stay tuned for some new developments as TW Designworks continues to grow! http://www.twdesignworks.com/ |