Van Otis Cookies

Van Otis makes the BEST handcrafted chocolates, and now they’re making cookies?!?

Nope. They're not. But you can.

I recently perused Van Otis’ retail shop in Manchester, New Hampshire with a super friendly and helpful member of the VO staff. We were on a mission to find a combination of ingredients that would take chocolate chip cookies to the next level, and I think our first attempt was a success.

I left Van Otis with a bag of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds and two 3 oz. Cranberry Almond Milk Chocolate Bars. At the grocery store, I purchased a bag of dried cranberries along with my cookie dough ingredients.

I decided which of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes - yes, I have more than one – to use for this experiment. The recipe comes from Alice Currah’s blog site, Savory Sweet Life, and it produces a flat, chewy cookie which could support my ingredients. The use of sea salt is what makes this cookie one of my favorites.

I followed the dough recipe and replaced the suggested 2 1/4 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips with the following ingredients:

• Two Van Otis 3 oz. Chocolate Almond Milk Chocolate bars, broken into bits
• 3/4 cup of Van Otis chocolate-covered sunflower seeds
• 3/4 cup of dried cranberries

The result was a flavor and texture filled cookie with the tang and chewiness of the cranberries, sweetness of the chocolate, and crunchy nuttiness of the seeds.

The next time you’re at Van Otis’ retail store or browsing their web page, think cookie not candy. What combination of Van Otis ingredients do you think would produce the perfect cookie?