3/4 cups dried cranberries
1/4 cup Southern Comfort
1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1 1/2 cups corn starch
3/4 cups sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick butter
2 eggs (or egg substitutes)
4 tbsp milk (I used almond milk)
1 tbsp orange zest
1/2 tsp vanilla
Put cranberries & SoCo in a bowl together so the cranberries can soak it up. When I did this, I accidentally put in a half cup of SoCo -- when it came time to add the cranberries to everything else, I fished them out with a fork & left behind some cranberry infused SoCo (which you could use for mixed drinks). I think this resulted in the cookies having slightly more than a quarter cup of SoCo.
Put the dry ingredients (cornmeal through salt) into a food processor; process until they're mixed & the cornmeal's as finely or coarsely ground as you want in the final product. I didn't have a big enough food processor, so I put in everything except the corn starch & mixed in the corn starch afterwards.
Add the chopped up butter to the food processor; pulse a couple times to chop it in. Again, I have a small food processor, so I did this by halves. Pour into a bowl. Add wet ingredients (eggs through vanilla); mix until it makes a nice dough. The recipe as written above is what I made; it includes 2 more tablespoons of milk than the original recipe, because my dough didn't come together well with just 2 tablespoons. I also didn't realize how much moisture the cranberries would add -- if I were making them again, I might just do 3 tablespoons at this point & only add the 4th if there was still dry mix after adding the cranberries.
Add in the cranberries & mix to combine. If you only used 1/4 cup SoCo, add any remaining liquid in the bowl to the cookies as well.
Form cookies on a silpat lined cookie sheet. These cookies don't really grow much, so you can put them pretty close together; they also don't change shape much, so if you put them in with little spiky bits of dough sticking off, the spikes will still be there when they get out. Bake for 20 minutes or so at 350 until they get a little golden brown around the edges. Best as dough (note: boozy dough) or when fresh & warm out of the oven.
The original recipe calls for rum rather than SoCo, but I was lacking in the rum department, so I ate a couple cranberries and sniffed different liquors while I was chewing them so I could imagine what the final result would taste like (rejected possibilities: Fireball whiskey & cinnamon spice Kahlua, because I felt both would overpower the other flavors).
This was also my first use of fresh orange zest -- I happened to have an orange around, so I zested it then ate the rest. I ended up with slightly less than a full tablespoon, but I feel like the cookies had enough orangeiness to them with just that. And it made the kitchen smell very fresh.
Makes about 4 dozen cookies.
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| This is the second batch -- the first batch had those little spiky bits I mentioned. |
