chocolate-dipped strawberry cookies

A couple of days before Valentine's Day I spotted these giant, perfect looking strawberries at the grocery store. They were just begging to be dipped in chocolate. Because my culinary focus right now is cookies I wanted to find a way to incorporate fresh strawberries and rich, chocolatey cookies into one. I tried to find an existing chocolate-dipped strawberry cookie recipe. But all of the ones out there were all wrong (they either had a non-chocolate base or were merely strawberry flavored, unacceptable either way.) After the early morning disappointment of my Red Velvet cookies I wanted to stick with an easy, chocolate cookie I was familiar with so I went the whole "homemade oreos" route and I assembled the cookies as follows:


Chocolate-dipped Strawberry Cookies


Chocolate Cookie (aka homemade Oreos)*
1 package of Devil's Food Cake Mix
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
[I doubled it...]

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Roll dough into quarter sized balls (can be made bigger or smaller if  you want to do mini or jumbo cookies.) Place on cookie sheets and bake for eight minutes.

3. Let cool slightly on cookie sheet and transfer to cooling rack.

Chocolate Whipping Cream**
Add about 2 tablespoons cocoa powder to a pint of heavy whipping cream. Whip together until right before soft-peak stage then slowly add powdered sugar and vanilla to sweeten to desired flavor. You can add more cocoa powder if you want to make it more chocolatey.

Assembly 
chocolate cookies
chocolate whipping cream
strawberries
melted chocolate (I like to use the milk chocolate Cadbury bars, I melted down 2 bars for this recipe)

After chocolate cookies have cooled completely place half of the batch on wax or parchment paper and drizzle with half of your melted chocolate as seen above.

Immediately place washed, dried and chopped strawberries on melted chocolate.

Take the remaining half of your melted chocolate a drizzle on top of strawberries.***

Let chocolate harden and set-up before assembling further (I just put them in the fridge for a few minutes.)

After chocolate is cool. Take reserved cookies and add a swirl of chocolate whipped cream and sandwich on top of a strawberry cookie.

To prolong the life of your cookie, refrigerate until serving. But I'd make the day of serving, because with fresh fruit it probably isn't going to stay fresh for long.

My Notes:
*These are like the easiest cookies to make and they still feel kind of homemade-ish. I usually just do cream cheese frosting in these cookies (sometimes even mint or peppermint flavored cream cheese frosting) but that wasn't what I was going for here. It just happened to be the easiest chocolate cookie recipe I could think to make.
**I was just going to do regular whipped cream but decided to try chocolate whipped cream at the last minute. I had never made it before and it tasted a little bit like it was chocolate pudding flavored. I need to toy around with chocolate whipped cream before I make a final decision on keeping it around.
 ***One of my friends felt like there was too much chocolate on these, that they were too hard in places. But other people were okay with it. So I guess use your own digression.

I liked these cookies overall. I considered just halving the strawberries but I think that would have made for awkward biting. I think they need to be diced or at least sliced down for the whole cookie to have the chocolate-strawberry essence. If I made them again I might just do them all as open faced cookies with just the strawberries and chocolate layer and leave the cream and top cookie off. It would save some time and would taste more like a pure chocolate-covered strawberry...But they still tasted good with the cream if you wanted to go all out.