Yesterday was another decidedly long day, but it was also a relatively smooth, productive day.  I’m happy with that combination.  When I got home from work, I had a bargain to take part in, so I kept moving.  Scott and I decided that it would be fair if he went to the grocery store and I baked cookies.  Everybody wins, right?

This recipe didn’t really excite me at first.  Chocolate cookies with caramel goo in the center?  Not really my thing.  I’m more of a mint chocolate girl than a caramel chocolate girl.  But Scott brought this recipe home from a work friend, and he promised the recipe would be worth my while.  I took his word for it and baked away.

Well, congrats, Scott.  You know a good cookie when you taste one.  Chocolate cookie all around the outside, melted caramel with a chocolate layer melted in the center, and pecans on top.  It’s a win.

Caramel Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 2 tsps. vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup chopped pecans (more if you like a lot of pecans on top)
• 36-ish Rolo caramels, more if you like small cookies, 30-ish if you like medium-sized cookies
• 1 T. sugar for topping

Instructions:

• Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
• In a small bowl, combine flour, cocoa, and baking soda.  Blend well.
• In a large bowl, beat 1 cup of sugar, brown sugar, and butter until light and fluffy.  (If you’re like me, you will accidentally melt half of the butter, and it will be less fluffy than it’s supposed to be.  Don’t worry, they’ll still taste great!)  Add flour mixture and mix well.  Stir in 1/2 cup of the pecans.
• Combine remaining 1/2 cup of pecans with 1 tablespoon of sugar.
• With floured hands (or not, depending on how much chocolate dough you want stuck to your fingers), shape about 1 tablespoon of dough around each Rolo (unwrapped), completely covering the Rolo.  Press ball of dough into the sugar and pecan mixture, covering 1/3 to 1/2 of the dough ball.  Place on an ungreased cookie sheet with the pecan side up.  Cookies should be approximately 2 inches apart on the sheet, more if your cookies are larger than suggested.  They’re done when they’re slightly set and cracking on top.
• Makes about 3 dozen.

• Eat this:

And after you’ve made cookies and want to sit down to eat all 36-ish of them, you make dinner.  Oh wait, that’s not how people normally live?  Hmm.  We’ve been eating dinner at 9 PM lately.  I can’t say it’s the best way to live, but there we are.

One of the main things that’s bad about eating at 9 PM is that by the time you get to dinner, there’s a lot of pressure on it.  If I wait until that late to eat, dinner had better be good.  So I sat down to eat with fear and trembling in my heart last night.

Then I took the first bite of my Walnut and Rosemary Oven-Fried Chicken (with asparagus) and was completely satisfied.  This will be cooked again in our house, possibly on a regular basis.  It’s so much healthier than fried chicken, and I will dare to say that I like it a whole lot more.  There’s so much flavor and crunch!

Technically, I made the recipe my own, but I’ll let you try it out from the original recipe from The New Way to Cook Light.  My only suggestion is to feel free to use dried rosemary.  The fresh stuff would definitely be better, and the dried stuff is definitely cheaper.  We went dried, and the meal was still awesome.

I might want to eat this once a week, but I’ll try to control myself.