52 Cookies - Chapter 38

This week's cookie is the epitome of Fall.  I am baking these cookies on the first day of Fall so I thought I should pick a recipe to serve as a tribute to the day and season.  Think of all of the smells you come across in your fall baking, ingredients that have a little more staying power, spices...  These cookies have all that and more.  And better yet, they are actually quite healthy too!

I pulled this recipe out of the October issue of Everyday Food.  I'm a subscriber and I just love this magazine.  Some recipes are a bit 'frou frou' for my liking, exotic ingredients and what-not, but otherwise, I find many of the recipes and kitchen tips to be mostly everyday...thus the name of the magazine.

So, here it is, from Martha's kitchen, to mine, to yours, err, your computer screen!

Apple-Raisin Cookies
Here's What You'll Need:
1 cup flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
ground cloves
1 stick butter, softened
 1 cup dark brown sugar
2 eggs
3 Tablespoons milk
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and diced small
1 cup raisins
powdered sugar

Here's What You Do:
Cream the butter and brown sugar on high for a few minutes.  Add the eggs, one at a time.  Combine the flours, baking soda, nutmeg, salt and a pinch of ground cloves.  Give it a light whisk to mix it together.  With the mixer on low, add half of the flour mixture.  Next add the milk and then finish with the remaining flour mixture.  Add the chopped apple and raisins and stir by hand.  If you use the mixer, you risk mashing the apple chunks and that's a no-no!

Mm mm!  Apple chunks!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and prepare your baking pans with a sheet of parchment paper.  Use your small cookie dough scoop, however, you can overfill it a bit.  It's a little difficult with those apple and raisin chunks in there to get truly uniformly shaped cookies.  I'm okay with that.  I'm on cold medicine this week, so I'm not as uptight about my cookies all being perfectly shaped like I usually am.  (Note to self:   Maybe I should be on cold medicine more often.)  

Martha wanted me to bake these for 14 minutes, but I decided Martha must be on cold medicine too because that sounded like way too long!  I started with 10 minutes and that ended up being a very 'good thing.'  You know your own oven better than me, so I'll let you decide how long to bake them.  Just remember, you can always add more time, but once a cookie is burnt, it's burnt.  And that's just plain wrong.

These cookies made the house smell good.  One thing you'll need to keep in mind if you bake these cookies - baked goods with fresh fruit in them do not last very long.  The moisture content of the fruit tends to turn a perfect cookie or quick bread or muffin, into a soggy blob.  You don't want any soggy blobs in your kitchen.  So eat them up quick or store some in the freezer until you need them!  Happy Fall everyone!