Cookie Monster: Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Covered Cranberries

August 28, 2013

From Sweets

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[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

I’ve been spending the last few weeks in Boston and on Cape Cod and simply reveling in all the things I love about this part of the country. First of all, the seafood is great, and the lobster is cheap ($2.99 in Maine right now, and I’ve seen $6.99 a pound in the stores). Then there is all the chowder, the glorious real-deal clam chowder, and the fact that you are never more than 5 minutes away from a Dunkin Donuts—which is good for both my coffee habit (I happen to love DD coffee) and for my small bladder. And don’t forget the cranberries, which pop up in just about every baked good.

I’m obsessed with the sweet-tart cranberry-raspberry jam from the Chatham Jam & Jelly Shop and the Cape Codder muffins from The Flying Fish Cafe in Wellfleet (they’re blueberry-cranberry muffins with a crunchy sugar top). I’ve also been eating my way through a huge store of chocolate-covered cranberries. Or I was, until I threw the remainder of my horde into a batch of oatmeal cookies.

It was a bit of a gamble, as I’ve never baked with chocolate-covered fruit before. Some of the cranberries were quite big, so I decided to make the cookies extra big to match. The resulting cookies blew me away. They’re the big and chunky kind you’d get in a store, with an oat-y texture and lots of brown sugar. The chocolate covered cranberries mean I get to combine my two loves (oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal-fruit cookies) into one treat. They’re so good that I’m thinking maybe I should give it all up and become a cranberry crusader to the West Coast. Boston, you with me?

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

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