 A tasty turn on the usual chocolate chip cookie includes delicious dried cherries. The recipe is below.
February 2006
Updated February 2007
|
|
Cherry Chocolate Chip Cookies
For Washington’s Birthday Or Any Day!
George Washington (1732-1799) was born on February 22; and we’ve been celebrating his birthday* since 1885, when President Chester A. Arthur signed a bill establishing it as a federal holiday (it was Lincoln [1861-1865] who had previously established the concept of Federal holidays). “The father of his country” commanded the Continental Army and led it to victory against the superior-armed British forces in the Revolutionary War. As our first president, he was the statesman who led the fledgling United States of America in its earliest days. A trained surveyor, Washington was a gentleman farmer. After service to his country, he returned to his farm, Mount Vernon, in Virginia.
The story of Washington chopping down a cherry tree in his youth is not true in the least: It was invented by an early biographer of Washington, Parson Mason Weems. Yet, the myth was taught to schoolchildren for hundreds of years, and became such a part of the legend of the Father Of Our Country that February was declared National Cherry Month (cherry season is July).
George Washington never had a chocolate chip cookie either: Chocolate for eating wasn’t invented until 1847. Prior to then, chocolate was only consumed as a beverage, hot chocolate.
But that’s no reason why we can’t enjoy eating the legend, in the form of a delicious cherry chocolate chip cookie, to celebrate Washington’s birthday in February or at any other time of the year.
Vary Your Favorite Recipe
It’s easy to convert your own delicious chocolate chip cookies to Cherry Chocolate Chip Cookies:
- Add 1/2 cup of dried cherries to your chocolate chip cookie mix.
- If you don’t have a recipe, we like the recipe, below.
- You also can try a version with cherry chips, dividing the chips in the recipe between chocolate chips and cherry chips. And you can even add 1/4 cup of dried cherries to that.
Cherry Chips
In addition to baking cookies, you also can use the chips to:
- Decorate cupcakes and cakes
- Sprinkle on ice cream and puddings
- Add to muffin and pancake batter
These cherry chips are available at baking supply stores or from Back To The Country Store.
|
 |
Cherry Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
Note: If you are a person who normally consumes fine chocolate rather than supermarket chocolate, you should try this recipe with fine morsels. We recommend brands used by pastry chefs, such as Schokinag bittersweet chips or Guittard and Merckens semisweet chips: You will notice a difference. Keep an eye out for El Rey morsels—hopefully, the great Venezuelan chocolate will become available to consumers.
Ingredients
 2¼ cups all-purpose flour- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened†
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 3/4 cup firmly-packed packed
brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon real vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs
- 2 cups (12 oz. package) real
semisweet chocolate morsels
(or use white morsels if you
prefer, as shown in this photo)
- 1/2 cup dried cherries (optional—
if you can’t find dried cherries,
you can order them here)
- 1 cup chopped nuts—walnuts,
pecans, macadamias (optional)
†Don’t melt the butter, let it soften for 30-45 minutes at room temperature. The physical properties of butter are changed when melted: they prevent the butter from being mixed properly with the flour in the cookie dough. Butter that is (or has previously been) melted coats the flour in the dough differently than softened butter. If you’re in a rush, to soften butter quickly, cut it into chunks and allow it to soften at room temperature for about 15 minutes. An even faster trick is to a stick of cold butter between sheets of waxed paper and hit it with a rolling pin on each side to smash the butter. If the butter has melted accidentally, use it for cooking and soften a new stick of butter for the cookie dough.
This recipe is based on the original Nestle Toll House Cookie recipe from www.verybestbaking.com. Photo courtesy of the Cherry Marketing Institute.
Directions
- Preheat oven to 375°F. Combine the flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Set aside.
- Beat the butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy, scraping often.
- Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture.
- Stir in morsels, dried cherries and nuts by hand.
- Drop dough by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.
- Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown.
- Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.
TIP: Store dough, covered, in refrigerator for up to 1 week or in freezer for up to 8 weeks.
Pan Cookie Variation: Grease a 15-by-10-inch jelly-roll pan. Prepare dough as above. Spread into prepared pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown. Cool in pan on wire rack.
Makes 4 dozen bars.
 |
Yummy Dried Cherries. If you can’t find dried cherries at your local market, you can order these beautiful Pacific Northwest dried bing cherries online from Washington’s Chukar Cherries (Washington D.C. gets all the publicity for its beautiful cherry blossoms, but Washington state is the cherry-growing capital of the U.S.). Click here to buy dried cherries. Certified kosher by KOF-K.
We eat them by the handful, toss them into cereal, sprinkle them on yogurt and desserts, use them to perk up salads of all kinds and to garnish meat, poultry, and fish dishes. They’re truly one of our favorite specialty foods. |
History Lesson
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12 and George Washington was born on February 22; and for more than a hundred years, in many states, the birthdays of those two great presidents were celebrated as separate holidays.
- In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, intended to create more three-day weekends for federal employees by moving the observance of three federal holidays—Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day—from fixed calendar dates to designated Mondays; and by establishing Columbus Day as a new federal holiday, also also to be observed on a Monday instead of his fixed birthday.
- From 1971 forward, the observance of Washington’s Birthday was changed from February 22 to the third Monday in February—a change that guaranteed that Washington’s Birthday would never again be celebrated on his actual birthday of February 22, as the third Monday in February will never fall any later than February 21. However, it was still called officially Washington’s Birthday.
- What about Lincoln? Early efforts to implement the Uniform Holidays Bill in 1968 proposed that the Monday of the 3-day holiday be renamed “Presidents’ Day” to accommodate Lincoln’s Birthday as well; but the passed version of the bill provided only for the relocation of Washington’s Birthday. Although Lincoln's Birthday had never been designated a federal holiday, it was observed as a state holiday in many parts of the country.
- After a new federal holiday was created to honor the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1986, some states dropped the observance of Lincoln’s Birthday as a separate holiday in order to maintain a fixed number of paid holidays per year (and others never observed it in the first place).
- As a result, there is no consistency in observations across the U.S. except for federal employees. States are not obligated to observe federal holidays; they may pass their own. Some states still observe Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays as separate holidays, some states observe only Washington’s Birthday, some states commemorate both with a single Presidents’ Day (or Lincoln-Washington Day).
|
Cookie portrait of George Washington by
Rolling Pin Productions. They’ll turn your own
portrait into cookies, too. |
- An attempt to clear up some of this unfortunate mess and give back recognition to Washington and Lincoln was made through the introduction of the “Washington-Lincoln Recognition Act of 2001.” However, it failed to clear subcommittee and died without being voted upon.
To dispel the major myths about George Washington:
- Much of what schoolchildren were taught about George Washington
for hundreds of years is false. According to MountVernon.org,
he did not have wooden teeth: He had false teeth, but they were
made of cow’s
teeth, human teeth and elephant ivory set in a lead base with
springs that allowed him to open and close his mouth. They fit
poorly and distorted the shape of his mouth—and were much more uncomfortable
than wooden choppers would have been.
- Washington did not throw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. Not only is the Potomac more than a mile wide and an Olympic discus champion might falter at that distance, but there were no silver dollars when Washington was a young man.
- Lastly, he did not chop down the cherry tree and then say to his father, “I cannot tell a lie.” Ironically, this story is itself a lie, made up by Mason Weems, an early biographer of George Washington (and a parson, no less), to illustrate Washington’s honesty.
It would also be a lie for Washington to proclaim cherry chocolate chip cookies his favorite, as neither hard chocolate nor the recipe existed in his lifetime...but we conjecture that had he had the opportunity, he very well might have said so. Perhaps even proclaimed it the national cookie!
© Copyright 2005-2008 Lifestyle Direct, Inc. All rights reserved. Images are copyright of their respective owners.
|
|
|
|
