Dark Chocolate Orange Cranberry Cookies Recipe

This Dark Chocolate Orange-Cranberry Cookies recipe is soft and chewy – the perfect addition to any Christmas cookie exchange!

There’s a “thing” in the food blogger world called The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap.

Last year, my Instagram feed was filled with people tagging #fbcookieswap and I just figured it was a super exclusive invite-only club. And…I thought the “fb” stood for Facebook.

People were getting cute spatulas from OXO and delicious cookies from all kinds of people and it looked like the coolest exclusive club on the planet.

And then I found out it wasn’t exclusive. Or invite-only. The only condition was that you had to have an active food blog, because it couldn’t very well be called a food blogger cookie swap if it wasn’t food bloggers participating!

When you sign up, you donate $4 to Cookies for Kids’ Cancer, then you get matched with other food bloggers. You get 3 names of people and you send each of them a dozen homemade cookies. The best part, though, is getting cookies from the other bloggers!

I received chewy gingerbread cookies from Taylor (Greens & Chocolate), white chocolate cookies from Jennifer (My Sweet Sanity), and frosted soft gingerbread cookies from Teri (The Freshman Cook). All of them were amazing and each of them are posting their cookie recipes on their sites today too, so go check them out!

For my contribution? I decided to make Dark Chocolate Orange-Cranberry Cookies.

How To Make Dark Chocolate Orange-Cranberry Cookies

Start by creaming butter with some brown sugar.

Then zest an orange. By the way, I’m adding a zester to my Christmas list. I’m pretty sure I got this one from Walmart for $1 a few years ago.

It wasn’t pretty.

Add an egg, vanilla, and some juice from the previously zested orange into the mixer and beat it all together.

The secret to this recipe is in the dry ingredients – pudding mix. It keeps the cookies moist and chewy and I use it in almost every cookie I make these days. White chocolate is my favorite flavor, though I’ve tried vanilla, chocolate, cheesecake, and butterscotch before, all with delicious results.

The rest of the dry ingredients are pretty standard – flour, baking soda, and salt. Whisk it all together, then mix it into the butter mixture.

And you get a beautiful cookie dough, perfect for taste testing. Not that I do that. (Yeah, I totally do that.)

Add some dried cranberries and dark chocolate chips.

Then it’s ready for scooping!

I didn’t have a working cookie scoop for years and now that I have one, I don’t know what I did without it. I love it so (thanks for getting it for me, Maren!).

Bake them up and you should probably eat one (or 5) while they’re still warm.

They’re like a jazzed up chocolate chip cookie with holiday flair. The slight tartness of the cranberries balances out the sweetness of the dark chocolate and there’s just a subtle hint of orange in the background.

Eat cookies and be merry.