Experimenting with GF Chocolate Chunk Strawberry Cookies
Yesterday, we had some friends over for a card game night. Since I am off on summer vacation (and since lack of people to eat my baked goods usually stops me from baking), I decided to bake something. When offered a choice, my husband requested cookies, and I decided to try and experiment with different mix-ins in order to make something new.
I like strawberries. Strawberries seemed like a fun option! But strawberries have a high water content, and my elementary baking knowledge knows that adding moisture will mess with the overall texture of the cookie. I am a fan of chewy cookies, but no one wants a soggy mess. I knew that if I did use fresh strawbs, I would need to change the ratio of wet ingredients I use, but had no idea how. Gluten-free baking is already tricky business when it comes to moisture. Thus, to the internet I went!
I did find one recipe that used fresh strawberries that was posted 14 years ago on a website meant for people sharing their own creations, but it was fully glutenated and only had 3 comments, none of which seemed to indicate that they had actually tried the cookies. However, this first result showed me that it was possible to make strawberry chocolate chip cookies, so it was a promising first step.
I decided to refine my search to look for specifically gluten-free strawberry chocolate chip cookies, and that yielded some more helpful results. I found one recipe that recommended using a combination of fresh and freeze-dried strawberries, but the fresh strawberries still worried me.
Let me let you in on a little secret: I make very good gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. I’m talking “you mean this is gluten-free??” level good gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. I’d like to think they even hold their own up to regular chocolate chip cookies. (Thank you, Girl vs Dough) Because of my love for this recipe and the success I have with making them, I decided to not mess with the moisture content and instead add freeze dried strawberries. I found a second recipe with determine the amount of freeze dried strawberries (about 1 cupish), and went to the store.
While there, I decided it would be fun to get chocolate chunks rather than chocolate chips. This may have been my first mistake. It took several laps around my local grocery store to find these damn freeze-dried strawberries. They were in the produce section. Who decided to put freeze-dried strawberries, not with the other freeze-dried fruits (of which there were two different sections, by the way) but all on their own and in the produce section?!?!?!
I digress.
I made my cookie dough as usual. Then, when it was time for the mix-ins, I crushed up a cup(ish) of freeze-dried strawberries and added a cup(ish) of chocolate chunks. Mix, chill for an hour (one of the secrets to amazing cookies), and we’re off to the baking races.
Part of the problem I faced as I started to create the cookie balls was that there were some portions of dough that had a lot of mix-ins (yum) and some that had not-so-many mix-ins (less yum). This was definitely user error (and a fear of over-mixing the dough), though perhaps I needed way more freeze-dried strawberries in general.
It was also a particularly hot-day, and (due do a previous oven incident by my husband), had to keep the windows open for much of the dough-ball prep. I keep the dough in the fridge while other batches are baking, but even still there was slightly more spread on some of them than I’d like. I also made the sizes very inconsistent, but that’s part of the fun and charm of being a home baker.
Overall, the cookies looked and tasted pretty fantastic. Except, they didn’t taste like strawberry. Maybe, if you were nice, you could say that they tasted like a strawberry La Croix sneezed on them, but it definitely was not worth the extra time (and money). I think adding more strawberries, or using chocolate chips instead of chunks, could have helped allow that flavor to shine more. The one part I am unsure of how to fix is the texture of the freeze-dried strawberries. I don’t think it was a huge problem (and in fact our friends all ate multiple cookies and took a bunch home with them), but the post-baked strawberries had a strange, almost-papery texture. I’m not really sure how to help with that, nor am I sure if it is worth trying to figure out.
Never the less, I really enjoyed baking these cookies. I was excited to share something new and experimental with my friends. During the process of my experiment, I was so thoroughly caught up in what I was doing that I did nothing else. This might not sound like much, but in this era of constant stimulation, it was nice to focus on one thing without pausing to check my phone. I didn’t even play music!
Plus, they looked great and tasted even better.
