Chocolate Cherry Piecooken

Chocolate and Cherry are a great pair. It’s the foundation of Black Forest Cake, Cherry Cordials, and Cherry Garcia ice cream. So why not repurpose some leftover - or purpose-made - cherry pie into a batch of chocolatey cookies?

Ingredients

• 8 oz Unsalted Butter, softened
• 9 oz Dark Brown Sugar
• 2 oz Granulated Sugar
• 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
• 1 tsp Baking Powder
• 2 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt or 1 tsp Table Salt
• 1 Large Egg
• 9 oz All-Purpose Flour
• 3 oz Dutch Process Cocoa Powder
• 4 oz Semisweet or Ruby Chocolate Chips
• 10-14 oz Cherry Pie, frozen and roughly chopped, straight from the freezer

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375ºF, and line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour and cocoa powder.
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter, dark brown sugar, granulated sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt at medium-high speed until light and very fluffy. This should take about 4-5 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and continue creaming for another minute to ensure everything is evenly aerated.
4. Scrape down the bowl and beater again. Add the egg and continue mixing on medium-high speed until it is well combined.
5. Turn off the mixer and add the flour and cocoa mix all at once. Mix at low speed until the dry ingredients have mostly disappeared and there are no large pockets remaining. It shouldn't be a completely homogeneous dough yet, but nearly there.
6. Add the chocolate chips and your pie chunks. Fold them into the dough by hand with a flexible spatula, being sure to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl to incorporate any blobs of stubborn wet ingredients. Overmixing isn't a huge concern here, but the cookies will turn out better — both in texture and presentation — if you do your best not to break up the pie chunks. Breaking them up will cause your cookies to absorb all the moisture from the filling and that will give you caky cookies more akin to muffin-tops.
7. Portion the dough onto your lined parchment in 4 oz mounds, allowing space for spread. You should have room for six on a baking sheet. Bake at 375ºF until the edges have set and begun to crack, and the top has lost its wet-dough-sheen, about 12-15 minutes.
8. Let the cookies cool on the pan until set, around 20 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack.