Strawberry Shortcake

After much anticipation on my part, I finally created a strawberry cookie this week.

I had been thinking about this cookie for a few weeks now. I knew fresh strawberries weren't going to work after my mush cookie experience with the blueberries. Although my local stores had quite a selection of dried fruits, none of them carried dried strawberries. I resorted to a google search, which led my to nutsonline.com - quite possibly the best source for nut and fruits on the internet! They have such a wide selection of dried fruits, some of which I had never even heard of. Also, they shipped my order within 45 minutes of my placement and it arrived in 2 days. The dried strawberries were soooo delicious and full of flavor, I was dying to get to work on my new cookie.

I decided to begin with a cookie base similar to a chocolate chip cookie dough. In the first batch, I added about a cup of the cut up dried strawberries and half a cup of white chocolate chips - trying to imitate the flavor of whipped cream. Boy were those cookies sweet! So, so sweet. The kind that makes your teeth hurt when you're eating it. Also, they had hardly any strawberry flavor.

I went back to the drawing board to develop a less sweet cookie base. I adjusted the amount of brown sugar as compared to white sugar, since brown sugar gives less of a sweet taste. I also decided to add strawberry extract instead of vanilla. Since my original recipe had very little liquid and I liked the consistency, I decided to substitute part of the butter with shortening, which has less water than butter.

The result was fantastic! I've been sharing these cookies with taste testers all day. I got one vote to add some kind of icing, to mimic whipped cream. One vote to add nuts. Five votes that the cookies were perfect and needed nothing changed at all. And one person who proclaimed these the best cookies they've ever had in their whole life! What a compliment.

I think I've got a winner. Now, perhaps I will try some other fruits in this same recipe and see how they turn out.

Until next time...