Cherry Pickin'

I've had a craving for cookies lately, leaning toward chocolate chip. Sometime before I made them, I was browsing the dried fruit section of the grocery store. What a glorious selection of dried fruits and nuts! There's every type of prune you could imagine (individually wrapped? Come on now.): apricots, "tropical blend", berries, pineapples, what have you. And raisins! Lord, the raisins - don't get me started.

Anyway I quickly scanned the shelves for deals and spied a good one: $1.00 off coupon on Mariani's Dried Cherries. Score! I had no idea what I would do with them but I had to have them. AND with a coupon!

So imagine my chagrin when I got home and realized, despite handing the cashier my coupon at the beginning of the sale (as they tell you in the little signs), she failed to use it! I paid full price for those bitches! So now they probably don't taste as good (because we all know the better the deal the better food tastes), but I still love them.

So here they are in Red Velvet Chocolate Chip Cherry cookies. I got the recipe for Red Velvet cookies here and added the fixin's. The frosting is buttercream with cherry juice instead of milk.

What else would be good with these dried cherries? They are tart and sweet, so maybe a dessert with whip cream of some sort?


For the uninitiated, here they are unfrosted:



No matter what you add to them, these cookies are delicious. They are cakey, nice and soft, even days later. Cherry-ific! I just made that up! :)