Chocolate-Cherry Cookie Cups

I was going through the freezer to see what we leftover and I found leftover dough for cookie cups. Around the holidays, I had made a recipe for turtle cookie cups that didn't turn out pretty enough to blog. Thinking I would just make them again, I saved half of the dough and put it in the freezer.

Then I was going through the refrigerator and found that we had opened a can of cherry pie filling. I have no idea why this was even open but I didn't want to leave them in the refrigerator for long, so I began brainstorming up recipe concoctions that could use cherry pie filling. I don't actually like cherry pie filling so I needed to make something that Tom would enjoy.

I began to wonder how cherry pie filling would taste in a cookie cup and figured there was no time like the present to try things out.

Chocolate-Cherry Cookie Cups
Source: A Cookaholic Wife creation/Hezzi-D's Books and Cooks
Servings: 24 mini cups
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Ingredients:
for the cookie cups:

• 1 stick unsalted butter, softened
• ½ cup brown sugar
• ¼ cup sugar
• ½ tsp. vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• ¼ tsp. salt 

for the chocolate-cherry filling:

• ⅓ cup mini chocolate chips
• ½ cup cherry pie filling 
• ⅛ cup powdered sugar 

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350. Spray a mini-muffin pan with non-stick cooking spray.
2. Add butter and sugars to the bowl of your stand mixer and beat until combined. Add in vanilla and egg until fully combined.
3. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt. Slowly add flour mixture into the stand mixer until a dough has formed.
4. Roll the dough into quarter-sized balls and place each one into the well of a mini-muffin pan. Bake for 10 minutes and remove from the oven.
5. Use the rounded side of a teaspoon to press an indentation into each cookie cup. Working quickly, fill each cookie cup with a pinch of mini chocolate chips. Return to the oven for 1 minute.
6. Using a fork to remove excess glaze, scoop up cherries from pie filling and place 1-2 cherries on top of the chocolate chips, then return to the oven for 1 more minute.
7. Sift powdered sugar over the chocolate-cherry cookie cups before serving.

Adding the mini chocolate chips was a last-second decision but I'm so glad I decided to do so. Tom loved these and scarfed them down pretty quickly. Even though I'm not a fan of cherry pie filling, I can't not eat my own creations so I tried one and found that in this capacity, cherry pie filling isn't so bad!