Today we have a guest post from Laura Churchill-Duke. Some of you may know her from Valley Family Fun fame!
12 Days of Cookies: Chocolate Cherry Rounds
Baked by: Laura Churchill Duke, Valley Family Fun
I had just finished reading The Christmas Cookie Club by Ann Pealman for one of my book clubs. We decided that for our meeting, like in the book, we would all bring cookies to share and talk about the recipe we made.
I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make cookies for my book club using a cookbook I signed out from the library to write this guest blog post! I chose Chocolate Cherry Rounds from Canadian Living, The Complete Chocolate Book (p. 255) I love chocolate and my son loves cherries. This was the perfect combination.
The recipe:
2 oz bittersweet chocolate chopped
2/3 C butter
¾ C sugar
1 egg
½ tsp almond extract
2 C flour
¼ tsp each baking soda and salt
1/3 C chopped glace cherries
1 egg white
Melt chocolate, stirring until smooth. Let cool.
Beat butter and sugar, add egg and almond extract. Add dry ingredients.
Divide dough in half. Into one half, stir melted chocolate to form smooth dough. Set aside.
Into remaining half, mix cherries. Divide cherry dough in half. Roll each into 9 inch log. Wrap each in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Roll half of the chocolate dough into a 9×4.5 inch rectangle. Brush with some of the egg white. Place 1 chilled log of the cherry dough lengthwise along centre of the rectangle. Bring the edges of chocolate dough over log to meet. Press edges together and roll log to reshape if necessary. Repeat with remaining dough.
Cut each log into ¼ inch thich slices. Arrange 1 inch apart.
Bake 300 for about 15 minutes until the bottoms are light golden.
Makes about 50 cookies.
For this recipe, I omitted the almond extract because I was taking them to an event, and don’t like to take cookies with nuts in them. I also used maraschino cherries.
They turned out wonderfully and were so pretty!