Mokonuts’ Rye-Cranberry Chocolate-Chunk Cookies

I used Red Mill dark rye flour, not medium rye, and Ghirardelli bittersweet chips, not chunks. I followed detailed instructions for timing each step. Excellent. Highly recommended. Smiling here.

These are the best cc cookies I ever made! The poppy seeds, rye flour and cranberries make them delicious and more interesting than most cc cookies. I soaked the dry cranberries in a little hot tea before adding them to the recipe. I added a little bit more chocolate chips. I divided the dough in 21, not 15 parts, making normal sized cookies and I baked for exacly 10 minutes in a convection oven. The cookies came out perfect! Moist, chewy, just sweet enough, with lots of dark chocolate.

I assume the dried cranberries are the sweetened ones you find in the grocery store, not unsweetened (as those might be hard to find)?

To divide the dough into 15 cookies - which I can't do by eye! - each of my lumps of dough needed to weigh about 54 grams. These are substantial cookies.

These can be done gluten free; substitute buckwheat flour, amaranth, or coconut flour for the rye flour.

In the article, it’s noted that she slightly flattens the cookies before baking, but in the recipe it says to bake them in balls. Curious as to which it is?

It should be unsweetened cranberries if you want it closer to Hirayama’s original recipe as she wanted it to offset the cookie’s sweetness. She shapes them between her hand as she likes to have each one be uniquely uneven. She also presses them again when they come from the oven so they spread and crack some more.

I answered my own question. 425 degrees for 10 minutes was perfect. Amazing cookies. I used a 1 1/2 inch scoop to form the cookies and ended up with 23 smaller cookies.

Delicious! Used sweetened dried cranberries since that's all I could find - but it does lean a bit sweet still. I think an addition of orange zest or swapping out the cranberries for tart cherries or blueberries would be sublime. Yes, 425F works fantastically for this recipe. DEFINITELY make sure to rest the dough in the fridge overnight or longer; the dough's flavor develops considerably from it.

I tried both ways and found that it worked best to bake the round balls and then lightly smush them with a spatula when they came out of the oven.

Like most recipes, this is a platform to jump off of. You're making the cookies for you and your family to enjoy. Hate poppy seeds? (I do - except in savory recipes). Shove in a handful of nuts instead - any kind you like: pine nuts, pistachios, whatever. Go wild with the additions to the recipe and enjoy!

Why make this recipe at all then? The distinguishing ingredients are the rye and the poppy seeds! Sorry to sound snarky, but this kind of feedback always makes me giggle.

If your fridge is small, you can form the cookies as directed and then put them on a plate. You can use a piece of parchment paper to separate layers if necessary. Just remove the ones to be baked off and leave the rest on the plate.

I used Hodgson Mill's stone-ground rye, Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate chips, and subbed dried cherries for the cranberries because I thought the cranberries were too sweet. After forming the balls, I put them in a 9 x 13 covered container lined with wax paper to chill them. This took way less room in the frig and protected them from drying out. They are now my absolute favorite cookies!

I didn’t have dried cranberries so I spread frozen ones on a silicone sheet and put them in the oven at 225 deg F for about 70 min. They were rather sticky to handle but worked beautifully. These have a wonderfully complex flavor.