Chocolate Strawberry Cookies

A dear friend sent this recipe to me one night. She thought it looked good. And I completely forgot about it until a few weeks ago. The original recipe calls for white chocolate and I am not a fan of white chocolate at all so I substituted it with milk chocolate. When I shared the result with that friend, she raved about it and said it’s her new favorite cookies. We talked about what can we do to improve it and she came up with yet another great idea: lemon zest! Ryann also had a suggestion to use freeze-dried strawberries but they ended up being a little too brown. Anyway, here is the recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1.25 cups all-purpose flour
• 0.5 tsp baking powder
• 0.25 tsp salt
• 0.25 cup unsalted butter (this is 0.5 standard stick of butter), softened to room temperature
• 4 oz. cream cheese (this is half of the standard stick of cream cheese), also softened to room temperature
• 0.75 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 tsp lemon zest, dividied
• 0.75 cup chopped fresh strawberries
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 0.75 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (you can substitute with chopped semi-sweet chocolate, chopped bittersweet chocolate, or dark chocolate chips/morsels)
• 0.25 cup Demerara sugar (you can substitute with Turbinado sugar or you can omit them if you can’t find any)

Instructions:

1. If you haven’t yet done so, chop the strawberries to small pieces. A bit smaller than half-inch is what I like. You can go bigger (that’s what she said!) but remember that you will incorporate them into cookie dough so chop them into a size you’re comfortable with. They will get a little crushed during the mixing and may shrink a bit during baking. After chopping, pour the lemon juice over the strawberries, gently toss, and set them aside.
2. Beat the butter, cream cheese, and sugar and with a paddle attachment until light and fluffy. Add egg, vanilla, and half the lemon zest. Mix until thoroughly combined.
3. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a separate bowl and whisk together. Gradually add this dry mixture into the wet mixture and mix until they are well combined. Do not over mix to prevent tough cookies.
4. Stir in the chocolate and mix by hand. Drain your strawberries then stir into the cookie dough, also by hand. Be gentle but firm so that everything is mixed well but the strawberries are not all destroyed. Your cookie dough may be pink-ish from the strawberry juices, this is normal.
5. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Drop about 2-tablespoon-sized dough onto the sheet, spacing them about 1-inch apart. Depending on how big you like your cookies, you should get about 16-20 cookies. Put the entire baking sheet into the freezer.
6. Combine the other half of lemon zest with the Demerara sugar. This mixture will be the topping for your cookies before they are baked. I love lemon zest so I really ended up using maybe more like 3-4 tsp here but you can skip them altogether if you don’t have anymore leftover.
7. Preheat the oven to 350 degree Fahrenheit. Notice that I didn’t instruct you to do this as your first step. This is on purpose. The time that it takes your oven to come up to the right temperature is about the same amount of time that your cookie dough should sit in the freezer. You’re welcome. 🙂
8. Once your oven is preheated, bake the cookies straight from the freezer for about 15-18 minutes. If your cookies are larger, you may want to even go up to 20 minutes. They won’t brown much but they do firm up a little like cake so you can test them by poking them with your fingers (being very careful because they are hot!). If they feel firm to the touch, then they are done.

In my pictures below, you’ll see a couple cookies with dark brown spots on them. For those, I added some freeze-dried strawberries (find them at your local Trader Joe’s). Although they do add a nice contrasting texture, unfortunately they browned a bit too much in the oven. If you want to experiment with the, I recommend baking the cookies halfway, and then adding the freeze-dried strawberries as topping only during the last half of baking time.

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