Everything Cookie

I bake this cookie recipe from Martha Stewart fairly often. I use 1 cup of chocolate chips rather than the 4.5 oz of chocolate chunks because chocolate chips are easier. Next I use 1 cup of dried cranberries instead of the 1 cup of dried cherries. You can find toffee bits in the baking section of the supermarket or you could crush some toffee bars yourself if you're feeling ambitious.

I used to shell out more for the dried cherries, but my friends kept referring to my cookies as "those cranberry chocolate chip oatmeal cookies" so I decided that downgrading to dried cranberries wasn't going to cause much of an uproar. At $2.99 for a "wee" package of cherries barely big enough for one batch of cookies versus $7 for a "freakin huge" 3 pound bag of dried cranberries from Costco, I'm happy to make the substitution. The less I spend on dried cherries everyone thinks are dried cranberries, the more resources I have to spend on butter, flour and other stuff.

Lately I've added dried sweetened coconut to the cookies. I would reduce the other add in ingredients (oatmeal, cranberries, chocolate chips, toffee bits) by a little bit and replace that amount with the coconut. I threw in a whole cup of coconut along with the full allotment of other ingredients one time and Adam told me the cookies were great, but were on the cusp between "everything yummy in this cookie and I'm so excited" and "too many yummy things in this cookie and I'm overwhelmed." It's a fine distinction and you'll have to figure out what your threshold is so proceed with caution.