Orange Chocolate Brownie Cookies with M&Ms: Portland

Call me a cookie convert. For the longest time I had eschewed making cookies because I considered them time-intensive and associated them mainly with roll cookies. But drop cookies are awesome, and these are some of the best homemade cookies I’ve ever had.

The orange peel, cocoa powder and M&Ms combine to taste just like a chocolate orange that St. Nicholas used to leave in my stocking every Dec. 6. They’re quite perfect for holiday baking, and they made me feel quite nostalgic.

Here we have our standard wet-dry separation, followed by integration (I’m trying to get better at framing these cooking shots in a more interesting manner, hence the close-ups).

I used an ice cream scoop to form the cookies, and it worked almost perfectly. Though I might make them a bit smaller next time (story of my life). But on the cookie sheet before baking, they looked pretty delicious. And like usual, I saved a bit of the cookie dough for later.

While I waited for these chocolate orange delights to bake into brownie beauties, I took part in my latest entertainment enterprise: watching all 100 movies on AFI’s Top 100 movies list. It’s not that grand of an undertaking, though, as my parents had me watching and appreciating classic movies since I was old enough to stay awake for an entire film.

During this baking experience, I watched “All About Eve,” a drama about an aging actress who befriends a young fan and in the process, struggles with her relationships and career. The plot’s not really the important thing, though; it’s the characters.

After 15 minutes in the oven (and only a little disaster), they’re gooey like a brownie, crunchy like a cookie and taste like Christmas.

Orange Chocolate Brownie Cookies with M&Ms: Denver

This is about to be the shortest and dullest blog post in the history of the world. My camera is broken, and without thinking, I made these cookies while The Boy was at work, so I didn’t have any photo-taking apparatus – and I just didn’t even think about it! There is one picture of the finished product. So….yeah. Sorry about that.

These cookies were ultra simple to make, and turned out DELICIOUSLY. I followed all the instructions, though I gotta tell you: I was suspicious of the melted butter. I thought it was going to make my cookies like hard little rocks. WRONG. They turned out the right mix of chewy and fluffy and crunchy.

I was also almost too lazy to put the orange zest in. I mean, zesting a whole orange? You gotta be kidding me. What am I, some kind of freaking ZEST MACHINE? (Zesting anything is not that hard – I was just having a SUPER lazy day).  I am so glad that I added the zest, though, because the orange-ness was definitely the best part of these cookies. My batter was a bit dry at the end, too, so I juiced the orange and added that in, too. dee-lish,

The cookies turned out very well, and are on their way to the University of Wyoming as we speak. Here’s a picture of the afore-mentioned care package!

Challenge #6: Orange Chocolate Brownie Cookies with M&Ms

I feel bad picking this, since my last pick was also a cookie recipe, but I need some sturdy, delicious cookies to pack in a care package to my friend Shelby, who is a freshman at the University of Wyoming this year. I remember living in a dorm room, and though I secretly kind of enjoyed it, nothing made a day better than a care package. Plus, shelby’s had roommate issues – something I never really had a problem with (see photo evidence below of Nora and I enjoying roommatehood freshman year, and then one from our house four years later).

This time, we’re making Orange Chocolate Brownie Cookies with M&Ms. This sounds a bit like gilding the lily, I think, but Shelby has a sweet tooth (and so do I). The recipe is from probably my favorite cooking blog of all time, so you should explore around the Crepes of Wrath and fall in love with it, too.