Amoena baked White Chocolate and Cranberry Cookies

My favorite store-bought cookies are cranberry-white chocolate cookies. I'm not really a fan of cranberries... nor white chocolate, but somehow the combination works. Since I am not into baking and expanding my repertoire to cookies too, I decided to google for a recipe! I found several promising recipes, but I also found this old Google Plus post of mine:

This is a cranberry - white chocolate cookie. It looks home-baked but it's a lie. They're store-bought, a very cheap brand on top of everything. And they're wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I wish I knew how to bake cookies like this, it would make me so proud. I would be baking them all the time and forcing people to eat them so they would have to admire my baking skills. That's how wonderful they are. Just telling you, they're wonderful.

Obviously there was a picture attached too but it is irrelevant. Anyway. Apparently I used to dream about being able to bake such cookies, back in 2011. I think it's the circle of life. You dream of something, never do anything about it, and then later realize you've achieved it anyway. Or maybe it is just my life that works that way.

I found several recipes that pretty much sounded as the same thing. They all had white chocolate and cranberries in them, who could have guessed. No, really, the recipes were quite alike, they just had different amounts of things. I eventually chose one recipe from Good to Know website. Not because it appeared to be somehow more excellent than the other, but because the recipe was in grams and other measurements I was able to comprehend without consulting Google first. I have a really nice kitchen scale but I don't have US measuring cups. Though considering how many US recipes I use, that would make a nice gift. You know, for me.

I prepared my main ingredients. I made the dough. I forgot 100 grams out of my 190 grams of flour. No biggies, I was able to fix that even though I had already stirred in my cranberries and white chocolate. I am sure it made no difference. The cranberries were nice and soft by the way, got them right next door from Lidl.

Mmm...

According to the recipe I should have been able to make balls out of dough, roll them even. My dough was definitely too moist for that. And that is how I originally realized that I have way, way too little flour. But adding more flour didn't fix the problem. I just had to spoon the dough to the baking sheet. Not exactly pretty, and definitely not what I expected. That is not a ball! That is not anything you could work by hands. Ugh?

But how did they turn out! How! And are they as good as the cookies that inspired me? Are they something I would force people to eat just so they could admire my "baking skills"? First of all, they turned our really ugly. They spread quite a bit in the oven and they stayed quite moist. The cookies I like are really dry and small. I need to try to fix that next time. I just don't know how. More flour? Less something? I'm quite a novice when it comes to cookies.

Taste wise they are quite OK. They could taste better, but on the other hand they do taste like cranberries and white chocolate. It's more like the consistency I didn't enjoy so much. But this was just the experiment #1, and there will be more experiments in the future. I had to bake bread like million times before I got it right, I expect the same process with these cookies too. They will become better, every time I make them and after every recipe I try. Practice... makes perfect? Or at least prettier cookies?

And so... this was my first post about baking. But I am not turning this into a baking blog. This blog will be what it has always been: a blog about me. And I am not a pastry!