Cookies with a Surprise

Chocolate-Cherry-Nut Crunch

Get ready for a surprise. These cookies are nice and big and very pleasing to the eye. They look like giant sugar cookies, but just wait until you bite into them. The insides have everything you can think of milk chocolate, white chocolate, walnuts, almonds, cherries and don't forget the coconut. The recipe may seem a little different but I dare you to try them out. They are fluffy and so good you will be coming back for more.

Prep Time 30 min
Bake Time 10 min
Serves 24 cookies

Ingredients

Sugar Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
3 cup flour
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup sour cream

Filling Mixture
1/2 cup milk chocolate chips
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup walnut pieces
1/2 cup blanched and slivered almonds
1 cup of chopped dark cherries
1/4 cup coconut

Topping
1 cup coconut

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F. Prepare sugar cookies. Cream butter and sugar together, add in vanilla. Beat in eggs and sour cream. Add in dry ingredients, flour, salt, b.powder and p.soda. Refrigerate dough for 1 hour or overnight. Prepare filling mixture, in a bowl toss all ingredients together ensure it is evenly mixed. Roll dough into 1" balls. Indent each ball with a large thumbprint.


Fill the indented dough with 1 tbsp or more with the filling mixture. The filling look like its overflowing. Make sure there is a lot of filling in the dough.

Cover the top of the overflowing filling mixture with a little extra dough as shown in the picture below. Roll the dough into a ball. The dough should be approximately 2", should be twice the size from starting ball.
Roll the cookie dough in coconut. Cover the entire ball.

Place on cookie sheet 2" apart from each other and bake for 10-12 min. Cool and ENJOY!

TIP: You can freeze these cookies for up to 2 months. Place in an air tight container and freeze.

HISTORY
So these cookies are great, but you are saying they are just cookies right. Well no, these cookies can start making you think of history class.

Think of the cookies, they have nuts, coconut, cherries, white chocolate chips and milk chocolate chips. They are classy and elaborate. Is there a time period in history you remember that was excessive and elaborate.

Between 1600 to 1750 there was a new style in art, architecture and music called Baroque. During the Baroque period people the objective was to impress others. Many aspects of the Baroque period was excessive and elaborate. Art had elaborate decorations and deviate from simple shapes. Here are some examples of the Baroque era.
Interior of Wieskirche in German baroque style, by Johan and Dominikus Zimmerman.

Versailles Palace, commissioned by King Louis XIV.
Johann Sebastian Bach, composer during the Baroque era. Baroque music is considered some of the most complex of musical forms.
The chocolate-cherry-nut crunch cookies imitate the Baroque period because the ingredients included are very much in excess. The cookies have coconut on the top to represent that they are elaborately ornamented. The cookies are delicious but there is almost too much ingredients to be elegant and sweet. The cookie was showy because it included many wonderful ingredients. This represents the Baroque which is defined as flamboyant, elaborate and excessive.

Creativity
These cookies are creative because it is difficult to make a simple sugar cookie elaborate and excessive. I creatively chose all the ingredients to include inside the cookie to make it taste like they were over the top. They are creative because I chose sugar cookies to represent the periods in history Baroque and Classical. I did this so the reader could compare and contrast the two cookies, because they start from the same base cookie. I added sour cream into my sugar cookies for this recipe so the cookie recipe would also include many ingredients and so the cookies would have a nice fluffy taste. I creatively rolled the cookies in coconut to give the cookies a more elaborately decorative feel.