For the week of February 22nd, I was inspired by a muffin I had made for a coworker's birthday about 6 months ago. The muffins were a sweet corn with raspberries and blackberries. I had never been a huge fan of raspberries, because I had mostly only ever eaten things with raspberry filling, etc...anyways, I figured I would enjoy the muffins with the blackberries. Turns out the raspberry ones were delicious and I couldn't stop eating them. The corn and raspberry combo was so good together.
So I woke up early on Saturday morning, despite my best efforts to sleep in. I looked in the fridge at the remaining raspberries from last week's disasterous chocolate raspberry cookies and thought - why don't I turn that muffin recipe into a cookie? So I went to work calculating the ratios of ingredients for the corn muffin portion. Once I had a recipe put together, I spent some time thinking about how I wanted to incorporate the raspberries into the mix. I decided to make it a hidden pocket of raspberry in the middle of the corn cookie. If you've never had a hidden surprise in the middle of the cookie - it is a little extra work, but if you're careful about putting the cookie together so none of the filling peaks out, then it makes a really cute cookie. Basically, you take a small piece of cookie dough and make it into a ball. Put it on the sheet and press your thumb in the middle. Put your filling in the hole. Now take another piece of cookie dough and flatten it out, place it over the filling and press it together around the edges. If your filling is liquid, like in these cookies, be careful when you're pressing, because if you mess up your thumbprint, the liquid will run out the sides.
Just look at how these turned out.
Anyways, the cookies were delicious. They turned out a little sweeter than I wanted, but all in all a sweet cornbread flavor in the shape and size of a cookie. The raspberry filling was very good when the cookies were warm out of the oven, but turned out to be too little raspberry for the amount of cookie. Also, after a couple of days in the cookie jar, the liquid was absorbed from the raspberry into the cookie part. Although this kept the cookies from getting stale, the raspberry turned into a solid piece in the middle and was not very good. I think when I try this recipe again, I will use raspberry jam or something similar (which has a little more substance than pureed raspberries).
