Nutty White Chocolate and Peach Oatmeal Cookies and Kid’s Candy Cookies

I subscribe to Food Network Magazine.  Every month they have a two page set up with two chefs battling it out for who makes the better ______.  The May issue has Adam Gertler’s Kid’s Candy Cookies versus Sunny Anderson’s Nutty White Chocolate and Peach Oatmeal Cookies to see who created the better ultimate chocolate chip cookie.  Of course, I had to play along and try both to form my own opinion.

I declared Sunny the winner with her Nutty White Chocolate and Peach Oatmeal Cookies!  I made some minor changes to the recipe.  I threw in a couple extra tablespoons of flour since I think sometimes our high altitude affects certain cookies.  And Sunny’s recipe calls for 1/2 cup white chocolate chips, I used a good white chocolate bar chopped and used 3 1/2 ounces, which was about 3/4 cup.  I baked them for 13 minutes (instead of the suggested 15-17 minutes).  The cookies are a perfectly chewy oatmeal cookie with a nice little zing from the dried peaches.  I also made these a year or two ago when Sunny made them on her show, Cooking For Real and I used apricots instead of peaches.  I do consider myself a true dark chocolate lover, and was pleasantly surprised to like these as much as I did with the white chocolate.  I’m actually tempted to try them with dark chocolate, just to compare.  I think my thing with dark chocolate is that if I’m going to actually just eat some chocolate, I’d always pick dark.  But white chocolate has its place in plenty of baked goods. 

I did give Adam Gertler's Kid's Candy Cookies a fair try.  His cookies are full of bittersweet chocolate (take note--kids prefer milk or semi-sweet), toffee pieces, peanut butter chips and Pretzel M&Ms.  My only issue was that the recipe instructs you to add the Pretzel M&Ms before any of the dry ingredients and to beat for a few seconds to let the mixer break them up.  A few seconds did nothing.  But I followed the directions exactly.  So the M&Ms were mostly still whole, which are too big for the cookies.  I would put the M&Ms in a plastic bag and crush them slightly with a rolling pin to break them up.  The cookies also bake too flat for my liking and weren’t very nice looking.  (This is just my opinion.)

That said, these were not really disliked around here and definitely got eaten up.  I didn’t even photograph how strange the ones with whole M&Ms in them looked.    

So maybe I’ll have a monthly go at Food Network Magazine’s He Made, She Made showdown.  We’ll see.  I mean, if they do something like onion soup, I won’t be doing that. lol