Just a little cuckoo...err... cookie!

I have too many passions in life. Some are temporary, some are permanent, and I tend to get obsessive about all of them. As the long silence on the blog indicates, my passion for blogging has now taken a slight back seat. Not the cooking obsession, that’s been diagnosed as permanent. But the reading up of food blogs till 3am, surfing and bookmarking websites and recipes, thinking up of funny posts to go with all my recipes - all of that has waned a bit... hopefully temporarily.

My latest obsessions are TV shows (have been for a while now), and this one film called Ram-Leela. That’s a story for another day, but suffice to say that all my free time in the past few months was spent planning my life around Ram-Leela (or "Goliyon ki Raas Leela - Ram Leela" as its now called). But this past Friday the movie released, and all of you who read this blog will go watch it and send best wishes our way (even though you may not know why, but hey, I believe in unconditional love and the power of positive thinking!).

So that leaves us with the TV shows. Which I think I have a handle on. I just need to watch “The Good Wife” every Sunday, “The Vampire Diaries”, “Scandal” and “Greys Anantomy” every Thursday, “The Originals” every Monday and oh, catch up on Downton Abbey, Homeland, White Collar and Masterchef Australia :) That’s do-able, right? I mean I haven’t even put Criminal Minds, Elementary and The Blacklist in the list... which I watch whenever I am bored. So those don’t really count, do they? Ok, don’t answer that :/

All I am trying to say is that I'm going cuckoo balancing too many things and so I deserve a cookie. And now that all of you stuck around to read my crazy rants, here is your cuckoo.. err... cookie reward.

DRIED STRAWBERRY & CHOCO CHIP COOKIES
(This recipe is adapted from Divya’s recipe on her blog)

Ingredients
Butter – ½  cup at room temperature
Brown sugar – ½  cup
White sugar – ¼ cup
Vanilla extract - 1 tsp
Flour - 1 ½ cups
Salt - a pinch
Dried Strawberries – ½  cup (I used Fab India)
Chocolate chips - ½  cup
Milk - 2 tbsp, if required

Make sure the butter is at room temperature, add the sugar, and mix well with a fork.  Chop the dried strawberries into small pieces and add long with the  rest of the ingredients -flour, salt, vanilla extract and chocolate chips.

Knead with your fingertips till you get an easy to divide dough. If the dough is not coming together, add some milk, 1 tsp at a time. My dough was a bit grainy, maybe because of the granulated sugar. You could try powdering the sugar and then adding it to the butter. 

Rest the dough for about 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 160°C. Line a cookie tray with foil and grease it with butter or cooking spray. Now divide the dough into equal balls about half the size of your palm. Place them on the cookie tray and flatten them a bit. Bake for 15 minutes. The cookies will be soft in the middle but will harden once it cools down. Divya’s recipe said 22min but that burned my first batch of cookies. So do keep an eye out...