Me? With a baking recipe?
The other night was my night to cook. And while prepping dinner I thought about all the excessive ripening persimmon fruit we've got at our house. So it got me thinking - how can I use this all up without having to eat it raw?
I did some googling and came across this recipe for persimmon cookies. It's the first batch of cookies I've ever made on my own, and they turned out pretty well to me. But I did adapt this recipe a little more to my tastes - a.k.a, added chocolate.
I can't say that baking is my thing, but this recipe definitely was. So to a very novice baker like myself - this was pretty much a perfect recipe for tasty, spiced chewy cookies. Easy!
Persimmon cookies with raisin and chocolate chip
(makes approx 30-45 cookies.)
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup persimmon pulp (does not have to be smooth)
- 2 cups white flour
- 1/4 teaspoon table salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon crushed/ground clove
- 1 cup raisins
- 1 cup dark chocolate chips
Directions:
1) Preheat oven to bake at 160 degrees celsius.
2) Cream the butter and sugar together. Add egg, and then add the persimmon pulp and the teaspoon of baking soda. Mix until well-combined. I found not all the pulp blended smooth - but that's all good for a bit of chew.
3) In another bowl combine the rest of your dry ingredients and mix - that's the flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Stir the dry mixture with the wet ingredients until combined, the add in the nuts and raisins before the final mix. (Chilling the cookie dough at this point will help give fluffier cookies apparently, but I'm impatient.)
4) Line a couple of sheet pan with parchment paper and then spoon on the dough. I prefer mine smaller, maybe no bigger than a large bottle cap sized, though I'm scarce with piling the mixture on top. It did spread a bit too so I tried as best as I could to fit 12 on each pan. And I needed about 3-4 sheet pans for it.
5) Bake for 13-16 minutes. It browns quite easily, but the base underneath would still be soft. Leave to rest for about 5-10 minutes and the outside should harden a bit.
The consistency of the cookie is almost muffin/cake like, and a nice kind of cake-chewy, but if you eat it fresh out of the oven there's a nice little crunch of a coating. It just makes you feel like winter, in a good way.
