Chocolate Covered Cherry Cookies

Yup. You read that right.

I signed up for the cookie exchange at MOPS. We decided everyone should bring in 6 dozen cookies to exchange. I spent an afternoon scrolling through my options on Pinterest. Yes, it took the whole afternoon to narrow it down to the 6 or 7 choices than made the cut to my cookies board. I still hadn't made up my mind earlier this week when I noticed that I had almost all the ingredients for one of the recipes. Plus it would get the GINORMOUS bottle of maraschino cherries out of my fridge.

This morning my friend Laura came over. She hung out with the boys while I ran to the store for butter and eggs. 30 minutes and $50 later I made it home. As a blogging fail I forgot to get pictures of the boys helping us mix the cookie dough. It was ADORABLE. They took turns dumping things in the bowl, and then they each stirred the mix with their own spatula/scraper. Bean was done at that point, but her lil man J helped us make the dough balls and roll them in sugar too. And he did an excellent job of getting the cherries in the divots.

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Just before getting coated in chocolate.

Ingredients:
1.5c flour
.5c unsweetened cocoa
1.5 tsp baking powder
.25 tsp salt
1 stick (.5c) butter (softened)
1c sugar (for making the dough)
.25c sugar (for rolling dough balls in)
1 large egg
1.5 tsp vanilla
2.5 tsp maraschino cherry juice
30-40 maraschino cherries (my batches made about 35 cookies)
6oz chocolate chips (I used milk chocolate, would be good with semi-sweet or white too)
.5c sweetened condensed milk

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350
• Line baking sheets with wax paper
• Mix together flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Set aside
• In another bowl (I used my stand mixer with the flat paddle) cream your butter and sugar.
• By cream I mean you should add the softened butter and the sugar to the bowl. Then mix at a medium speed until they are light and and fluffy. You might need to stop the mixer scrape the side of the bowl and the paddle a time or two.
• Add the egg, vanilla and cherry juice to the butter mix. Stir until blended. About 30 seconds
• Switch mixing to a low speed and add the flour mixture until well blended with the butter mix. 
• Again, scrape the bowl and paddle as needed to make sure it is all combined
• Put the sugar for rolling in a bowl
• Scoop a heaping tablespoon of dough (I used my medium scoop from Pampered Chef)
• Roll the dough in your hands to form a ball
• Roll the top half of the ball in the bowl of sugar
• You don't want to roll the whole dough because the sugar on the bottom of the cookie could burn.
• Place the sugared ball on the wax paper 
• Use your thumb to make an indent in the dough ball
• Don't push too hard or the cookie will be too thin to support the cherry!
• Repeat with more dough, placing balls about 2" apart on the cookie sheet
• Once you are out of dough make your chocolate sauce
• In a double boiler melt the condensed milk and chocolate chips
• If you do not have a double boiler you can do what I did, add about an inch of water to a small saucepan. Place a metal mixing bowl on top of the pan creating your own double boiler.
• Using a regular kitchen spoon, place about 1 teaspoon of chocolate on top of the cherries. 
• Spread the chocolate around the cherries. I used my fingers for this part. The first batch I skipped this step thinking the chocolate would melt around the cherry as it baked. It didn't. See the picture below.
• Bake cookies for 10-12 minutes
• Let cookies cool for a few minutes on the baking sheet (just enough to firm up a bit)
• Transfer cookies to a wire cooling rack so that the bottom of the cookies don't continue baking on the hot cookie sheets.
• Store cookies in a airtight container at room temperature

The finished product on the cooling rack right before we taste tested a few. YUM!

As stated earlier I got the idea from pinterest. I did make some changes to the recipe, but here the version from Sweet Pea's Kitchen.