Blueberry Cookies

Summer flashback! From our massive archive of draft posts... written Wednesday July 17th and for some reason, it languished in drafts until now. Posted as written back in July...

We drove back from Philadelphia (a trip we'll write about shortly, we hope) on Sunday and stopped off in southern Jersey to do some grocery shopping. One thing we needed to stock up on was produce, and we loved the look of the fresh Jersey-grown blueberries that we found at Costco and Wegmans. They were the same price at both places, so we ended up picking up a 2 lb box from Wegmans. I mean, look at them - they're so plump and juicy!

Unfortunately no photo of the box since the raspberries spilled juice all over it and we had to get rid of it

On Monday afternoon, I was snacking on some blueberries when I came across some blog posts about summer berries and desserts. What perfect timing! Inspiration hit and I decided to modify a recipe from Serious Eats for blueberry cookies. Fruit in cookies is delicious, but even more so with fresh sweet blueberries like these!

Here's what I did:

Step 1: Mix 1 cup of all-purpose flour, 3/4 tsp of baking soda, and 1/2 tsp of salt.

Step 2:  Mix 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup of sugar and 4 oz (8 tbsp) of applesauce until smooth. [I used applesauce instead of using a stick of butter. I also used heaping cups of sugar for each so it was a little bit more than 1/4 cup.]

Step 3:  Mix 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract into the sugar-applesauce bowl.

Step 4: Mix 1 egg (or 1/4 cup of egg substitute) into the bowl with the sugar/applesauce/vanilla. Stir until smooth.

Step 5: Add the combination from the flour bowl into the wet bowl and mix until smooth.

Step 6: Gently fold 1 cup of blueberries into the batter.

Step 7: When the batter is well mixed, cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge for at least 2 hours. [I chilled it for 3 hours.]

Step 8: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper and drop the dough onto the sheets in rounded tablespoons. [Mine might have been a little bit bigger than that.]

Step 9: Bake cookies on the upper and middle racks of the oven for 13-15 minutes.

Step 10: Pull the cookies out and let them cool for about 3 minutes.

Step 11: Cool cookies on wire racks.

The blueberry cookies were soft, sweet and delicious. They were more like muffin tops than your usual cookies, but we liked that they were soft and chewy. And after all, isn't the muffin top the best part of the muffin?

You could feel the textural difference from using the applesauce instead of butter, but they were still good. Even better, there was no guilt about eating them because they were fairly healthy and full of good stuff. The recipe made 12 cookies, which lasted us... 2 days. I would love to make these again, but the blueberries were so good that we don't have enough left!