Chewy Cherry Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies

Christmas week. The shortest day of the year was December 21st — five hours and twenty-eight minutes of daylight. I've started counting. Not because the counting helps, but because the counting gives the darkness a measurement, and things with measurements are things you can survive. Five hours and twenty-eight minutes. Tomorrow will be five hours and twenty-nine minutes. The light is coming back, one minute at a time. In Alaska, you celebrate the minutes.

The ER is always strange at Christmas. People come in with injuries that are cheerful in origin — cooking burns from turkey fryers, cuts from new kitchen knives, the occasional ornament-in-the-throat pediatric emergency. But the other cases come too — the loneliness cases, the depression cases, the people for whom Christmas is a reminder of everyone who isn't here anymore. I understand both kinds. I'm both kinds, some years.

This year I'm cooking Christmas Eve dinner at Lourdes's house. Filipino Noche Buena — the midnight feast that follows Simbang Gabi. In the Philippines, Christmas Eve is the main event. You go to midnight mass, you come home, you eat until 2 AM. The food is everything: lechon, ham, queso de bola (the round Dutch cheese that every Filipino associates with Christmas for reasons that trace back to Spanish colonial trade routes), fruit salad with condensed milk, and hot chocolate — thick, Filipino-style tsokolate made from tablea.

I started prep on Thursday. The ham — a bone-in spiral-cut from Costco, because Lourdes draws the line at making ham from scratch in Alaska in December — will be glazed with pineapple and brown sugar. The queso de bola is ordered. The fruit salad is Angela's job — a can-heavy, condensed-milk-drenched situation that involves fruit cocktail, cream cheese, and the particular Filipino conviction that fruit salad is a side dish, not a dessert, a classification that baffles non-Filipinos and delights everyone who eats it.

I made the tsokolate tonight as a test batch. Tablea — rounds of pure cacao — dissolved in water and milk, whisked until frothy with a wooden batidor, the traditional chocolate whisk that Lourdes brought from Iloilo and has used for forty years. The chocolate is thick, bitter, barely sweet, nothing like American hot chocolate. It tastes like the Philippines tastes in Lourdes's memory: intense, dark, real. I drank it in my apartment and the warmth spread from my stomach outward and the darkness outside was total and the darkness inside was manageable and the chocolate was the bridge between the two. Merry Christmas. Almost.

After that test batch of tsokolate — the tablea dissolving into something thick and dark and real — I wanted to bring that same depth of chocolate to the Noche Buena table in a form everyone could take home in their hands. These Chewy Cherry Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies are what I landed on: the dark chocolate echoes the bitterness of tablea, the dried cherries carry a brightness that feels like those first returning minutes of December light, and the oats give them the kind of chew and heft that belongs to a midnight feast. I made them the same night as the tsokolate, and the apartment smelled like Christmas in a way that was only good.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 12 minutes per batch | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (not quick oats)
1 1/4 cups dark chocolate chunks or coarsely chopped dark chocolate (70% cacao recommended)
3/4 cup dried tart cherries

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat oven to 350°F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl using a hand mixer or stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the softened butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar together on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed.
Add eggs and vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla extract and mix until fully combined.
Combine dry ingredients. In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.
Mix in dry ingredients. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix on low speed just until no dry streaks remain. Do not overmix.
Fold in oats, chocolate, and cherries. Using a sturdy wooden spoon or silicone spatula, fold in the rolled oats, dark chocolate chunks, and dried cherries until evenly distributed throughout the dough.
Portion the dough. Using a medium cookie scoop or a heaping tablespoon, drop rounds of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them about 2 inches apart. Gently press each ball down slightly with your palm.
Bake. Bake one sheet at a time on the center rack for 11–13 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly golden but the centers still look slightly underdone. They will firm up as they cool.
Cool. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat with remaining dough.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chewy Cherry Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies — The Warmth That Bridges the Dark