Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk and Coconut Cookies

I think I might have started a new thing for family birthdays. It's happened twice now, so it's at least on its way to becoming a thing. Since I bake a lot, and I really can't or shouldn't eat as much as I bake, I decided to send cookies to family members on their birthdays. I'm sure that now this is in writing, I'll not have time to send cookies for the next birthday. It might just be a when-I-have-time thing, and that way the cookies will always be a surprise, right? This cookie recipe is from The Greyston Bakery Cookbook, and coconut is added to the dough. I bought a bag of natural, unsweetened, shredded coconut and then worried that the cookies wouldn't be sweet enough since I didn't use the regular, sweetened stuff. I tasted the dough before I baked the cookies to see if I thought I should add more sugar, and it seemed good to me. Kurt was happy to taste test a cookie fresh out of the oven, and his reaction made me confident they were just fine. The cookies almost disappeared before I could box them up for shipping.

There was nothing unusual about making the cookie dough here. You could use chocolate chips, but the recipe called for chunks, so I chopped a bar of bittersweet chocolate into bits. At two different cooking classes I attended, I learned the same lesson from both Nick Malgieri and Alice Medrich. When you chop chocolate into chunks for cookies, you want to leave the chocolate dust behind. Nick Malgieri places the chopped chocolate in a sieve and shakes it to remove the pulverized stuff and keep the chunks. Alice Medrich used her hands to pull the chunks away from the dust on the cutting board. The fine, powdery chocolate muddies the look of the dough and using only the chunks results in a neater cookie. So, cream butter and brown sugar, add an egg and vanilla, sift flour, baking soda, and salt and add oatmeal then add that to butter mixture, then fold in shredded coconut and natural, unsweetened is fine and neat, dust-free, chocolate chunks. Drop into mounds on baking sheets and bake.

These were easy, straightforward cookies, but the addition of coconut to an oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie was new for me. It's an excellent addition, adding a little chewiness, and one I'll continue to include from now on. Actually, now that Kurt knows about this cookie flavor and will no doubt be requesting it frequently, I'll be baking a lot of these cookies.

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