Lately she's been featuring a tasty-looking bunch of cookie recipes and other sorts of desserts. We're planning to give her Coconut Pudding recipe a try, but tonight we were in more of a cookie mood. After looking through several good options, we settled on her Coconut Orange Slice Cookies. We both liked the basic idea of that one, but I decided to make a couple of changes, in order to put my own spin on her recipe.
You can see her original here: http://iowasue.blogspot.com/search/label/Cookies .
The changes I made consist of the following:
1) Whereas the original recipe called for some cut-up Orange Slice Gumdrop Candies, we decided to go a bit more healthy. I chopped up a half-dozen dried apricots and a tablespoon or so of dried cherries.
2) In the original recipe, the dough was placed on the cookie sheets by the heaping-teaspoonfull. I wanted to make slightly larger and thicker cookies, so I divided the dough into a bunch of balls about the size of a ping-pong ball, then slightly flattened them, placing 9 on a sheet in three staggered rows. As a result, I got two dozen cookies, rather than the three dozen one gets if exactly following Iowa Sue's original recipe.
3) Rather than oil or spray the cookie sheets, I prefer to line the sheet with parchment paper.
Other than those changes, we followed Sue's recipe exactly. So, if someone wants to try my version, go to her blog, get the original recipe there, then make the changes outlined above. Or, you might want to make her version as well as mine. After all, is there ever a situation in which two batches of cookies isn't better than a single batch?
Here's the result of my tinkering with the original recipe.
We're quite pleased with these cookies. They're nice and crunchy due to the cornflakes hand-mixed into the dough, and the chewy bits of fruit provide a nice contrast with the cookies' crispness, beyond that already provided by the coconut. The bits of dried cherry also add a tartness that contrasts nicely with the cookies' sweetness. I'll probably put more of those in the mix next time, but I decided to go a bit light with the cherries this time, as I didn't want to take a chance of the tartness overwhelming the other flavors.
All in all, these are great cookies. I guess a good name for my variant version would be Fruit and Coconut Crunch Cookies. Still, the real credit belongs to Iowa Sue. So, thanks for posting the the original recipe, Sue. I'm looking forward to trying out some more of your recipes real soon.
We are flattered that you liked the recipe. I would hope you try the original recipe also as they are quite a good cookie as posted.
ReplyDeleteWe probably will try the recipe as you wrote it at some point as well. We decided to go with the dried fruit as a bit more healthy than the candy bits - though worrying too much about health while baking cookies is of course sort of goofy - but some other time we'll probably make the original version. Juli works with kids some of the time, and we've been talking about making up some cookies to help encourage (and then reward) good behavior in the youngsters, and I'm guessing they'd probably like the candy bits more than the tart fruit.
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