White Chocolate and Cranberry Cookies

 My essays have been handed in, a brand new pad of paper opened and the locations of my lectures have been ascertained.  On the wave of these triumphs I indulged in my first baking project of 2012.

I recently discovered something about myself which I had missed for years.  Occasionally the suggestion would spring to mind, but I would ignore it, not daring to believe it could be true.  However, I cannot lie to myself any longer: I love cranberries.  I love them with brie and bacon; I love them in those ‘Eat Natural’ bars with the light blue wrappers; I love them with chocolate.  What I do not like them in is juice, and it was this which put me off of trying them for so long.

 While I was perusing my recipe books over Christmas, dreaming of one day having time to put down a book and pick up a mixing bowl, one recipe kept catching my attention.  It was in The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days and was accompanied by a glossy picture of large, American-style white chocolate and cranberry cookies wrapped in ribbon.  The combination of chewy cookie, sweet white chocolate and strong, fruity cranberry suck in my mind and now, finally free from the clutches of deadlines, I decided to provoke some Christmas memories and try them out.

I do not have a very good record with cookies.  While I will happily play salmonella roulette and risk eating the mixture from the bowl (not something I would recommend, by the way), I am paranoid about exposing anyone else to this by giving them something which has been undercooked.  As such, my cookies are generally overdone and crunchy rather than golden and chewy.  However, I was determined that I would break this curse.

The dough turned out to be very thick; it resembled the cookie dough that is sold in tubes in America, which I decided was probably the right idea.  Following the recipe, I rolled it into large balls containing about two tablespoons of mixture each and put six on a tray with enough space to allow them to spread out.  Peering through the oven door ten minutes later, I saw that a miraculous change had occurred: they had all sunk into, well, cookie-shaped cookies!  The timer went and I took out the first batch.  Cue a dilemma: did they really need to go back in, or was I being paranoid?  I put them back in and waited, tensely. 

Despite an agonising few moments while they were cooling, in which they seemed to be flopping around in an undercooked mess, they hardened up and – a Christmas miracle – were chewy and gooey in all the right places.  The cranberries and chocolate were delicious, particularly caked in cookie goodness, and my housemates, who become endearingly childlike in the face of free cookies, were delighted.

With the cookie curse broken, the Christmas muse offering a final helping hand before December and the cranberry having claimed its rightful place in my affections, it seems that this is the start of a beautiful friendship and, hopefully, a bright baking year.