12 Days of Cookies - Day 10 - Cranberry-Orange Drop Cookies

Welcome to the latest installment of the 12 Days of Cookies!  This is number 10, and I'm hoping to get some more baked today.  I actually made these last night, and stayed up way too late.  Not just because I was making cookies, it just worked out that way.  I think I was enjoying the peace and quiet too much. =)  There's not that much of that around here.  Though I must say, it's fairly quiet right now, since both my girls are glued to the Dora Christmas special.  *sigh*  Not sure if that's entirely worth it--calm is good, but Dora can be pretty annoying. =)

For this latest cookie, I went with something easy, that I could work on in between my other baking.  (I was also working on focaccia for the BBA Challenge last night--not hard, but lots of waiting time.)  There's a little bit of waiting for the cookies, as well.  The first thing you do is mix a lot of dried cranberries with some orange juice, and let them sit for about half an hour to plump up a bit.  While I was waiting on that, I mixed the dry ingredients--flour, baking powder and soda, salt, cinnamon and dried ginger.  I increased the dried ginger to 1 1/2 teaspoons, since I didn't have any fresh ginger (the recipe calls for both).  I also grated the orange zest (clementine this time).  I made a change on the nuts--the recipe calls for walnuts and pistachios, but I had my fill of shelling pistachios yesterday morning.  So I used walnuts and pecans. I used the small bowl of my food processor to chop them, and threw the fresh (frozen) cranberries in with them so everything got chopped at once.  After that, the mixing went quickly--cream butter with brown sugar, add the zest, egg and vanilla, mix in the dry ingredients, and stir in the fruit and nuts.  I used my #40 disher and ended up with 3 1/2 dozen cookies.  I baked them at 325 degrees F for 17 minutes.

While I made the cookies last night, I waited until this morning to take pictures.  I've been having a lot of fun coming up with ideas for festive holiday food photos.  And I really enjoy reading everyone else's 12 Days of Cookies posts and getting new ideas for pictures from them.  For today's post, I had some help from my resident food stylist:

She also also asked if she could take a picture or two.  This one is hers, which shows our high-tech photography studio:

The verdict?  I'm a bit surprised by how much I like these.  I don't usually like nuts in cookies all that much, but as Brianna put it, the nuts go quite well with the cranberries.  Both girls seem to like the small sample they had.  As if they would say anything else--if they did, I might not let them sample cookies for breakfast anymore! =P   Most of these are destined for the potluck we're going to at lunch time; hopefully everyone there will enjoy them too.

If you'd like to give these a try, you can find the recipe here.  And be sure to check out the other bakers participating in the 12 Days of Cookies to see what they've baked up recently!  =)

Andrea of Andrea's Recipes

(honorary member and our founder but not participating this year)

Claire of The Barefoot Kitchen

Courtney of Coco Cooks

Judy of No Fear Entertaining

Kelly of Sass & Veracity

Michelle of Big Black Dog

RJ of Flamingo Musings

Sandy of At the Baker's Bench

Tiffany of The Nesting Project