Berry, Berry Good

Last fall my friend Sandy was selling Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough for a fundraiser for her son's school. Thinking back, I don't remember Lori's school offering anything like cookie dough for fundraising purposes. I remember gift wrap and magazines. Anyway, these cookies come in a variety of flavors from chocolate chip to strawberry shortcake. Yes, strawberry shortcake. And they are mouth-watering delicious. But I have to say they do not taste like shortcake. And there is no whipped cream in the ingredients. However they are goooood. Good enough for me to have spent way too much time searching the internet for a clone recipe. I found a few for the chocolate chip cookies, but nothing for the strawberry concoction I was looking for. So I came up with one on my own.




I remember there being a lot of butter in the dough, more than I'd typically use. And a richness from brown sugar. My guess was the strawberries are dried. And there were white chocolate chips in there. So that was my starting point. I made these for Sandy's birthday the other day, because with all that butter and hard-to-find dried strawberries, this is a special occasion cookie. I say hard-to-find dried strawberries because they're not a common item in most supermarkets, but do check the produce department. Also, if you know the way I bake, you may be surprised that I didn't use any whole wheat or oats in the dough- just all purpose flour. Not that they wouldn't have worked in the recipe, but birthdays wait for no one, and trial and error time was short.

Strawberry Delight Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened to room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 cups AP flour
1 cup dried strawberries
1/2 cup Nestle's white morsels

Pre heat oven to 375 degrees
In large bowl, beat butter and sugars until smooth. Add the egg, vanilla, salt and baking soda. Scrape sides of the bowl to incorporate all ingredients. Add flour, mix, scrape sides again and when blended, add strawberries and morsels.

I don't have a cookie scoop, so I just drop the dough by large tablespoonfuls onto a cookie sheet. I lined my cookie sheet with parchment, but with all that butter, you probably don't have to. Bake 10 minutes until the edges look golden. Don't over bake. This recipe makes 30 cookies.

One thought I had after I made these little gems was to omit the morsels in the batter, melt them in the microwave, and drizzle them over the baked cookies. Yes, I will try that. Who's birthday's coming up soon?