I have a go-to chewy chocolate chip recipe that I’ve used for over 10 years. Whenever I was feeling stressed out in University, I would bake! There’s something very therapeutic about beating butter until it almost turns to cream, and getting an arm workout by mixing all kinds of ingredients together until it becomes a firm dough! The kitchen would smell amazing (hello, aromatherapy!) and then I could delight in my creation by eating it and also using the cookies to bribe people at school into joining my intramural teams! (Always a hustler..:)

Former ultimate frisbee teammates – remember that time one of our players vacuum-sealed the cookies I made by sucking all the air out of the ziplock bag!!s?? I thought it was a bit strange then, but no more! Especially since that’s kind of what Eric and I do to prep food for our buttery-smooth sous-vide creations 😉

Back to the cookies: my secret was to add toffee bits to the batter to make the cookies chewy and more caramelized. Jen, my baking partner-in-crime swears by HER crack-cookie recipe that also features toffee bits, along with dried cherries, bitter-sweet chocolate chunks and oatmeal.

Today is a bit of a dreary, rainy Vancouver day so I spent the morning baking her recipe! I’m about to head off to my Women’s Field Hockey Playoff game and since my teammates always have nice things to say about my food photos, I’m bringing them a fresh batch!

As mentioned above, the two key ingredients that make these cookies stand out are toffee bits and dried cherries.

Dried cherries can get pretty expensive, so Jen suggests substituting cherry-flavoured craisins. Since this was my first time making them, I wanted to go for the real thing. I even chopped up the cherries further so every cookie would be packed with a satisfying amount of cherry bits.

Getting all the ingredients in place.

Creaming butter .. until it almost turns white:)

The magical toffee bits!

Chilling the dough.

I read some review that the cookies became flat. Chilling the dough helps prevent this and is a *required* step for those fussy Momofuku Cornflake Crunch cookies I posted earlier.

Putting the cookies on a parchment-paper lined baking sheet.

Another tip: take the cookies out a bit early and let them finish “baking” on the sheet. Do this to prevent over-cooking. Plus, you get a softer, chewier cookie this way.

I left one batch in for the reccomended 16 minutes and it became crunchy. Still good, and I know some people prefer this, but I don’t 😉