Sweet Melissa Sundays is group for people who adores the Sweet Melissa Bakery in New York, and with the help of Melissa Murphy's book aptly called The Sweet Melissa Baking Book, we plan to bake our way through it. Although I haven't been to New York and haven't tried personally pastries from Sweet Melissa, having read so much good reviews about her bakery and book, I just knew I have to try it.

This post is my first time in joining this group and this is also my first time in making sliced cookies! Weird though I know, I've been making cookies for so long but I always used the scoop method and this cookies definitely wouldn't work with the scoop method because they don't flatten out like other cookies I've made several times before.

They are quite easy to make and shape though cutting through them equally tends to be a bit trouble for me. But of course these are so much easier than cranking out my ice cream scooper. I cut them both tick and thin version. The thin version I found have to bake until a bit crisp because they tend to fall apart when picked up. The thicker version are like cakey and not at all cookie like which is what I was expecting. But then I'm not so sure what the texture should be.

What I love with this dough is that it's very soft and yet not sticky, so it's easy to shape into logs. Although there are some issues I wanted to address, the recipe specified that it makes 24 cookies? Well that seems to be a mistake because I already doubled the recipe and I just barely reached the 24 count, hmmm...maybe the circumference of my logs are a bit big or something. The dried cherries are hardly noticeable in terms of the look and the taste, the cherries that I get here in Manila are dark in color so they tend to blend in with the chocolate dough and as for the taste, in my humble opinion the chocolate overshadows the cherries. Next time, I'll probably try this version from non other than Martha Stewart. For the meantime it's no biggie, I've enjoyed the process and my family enjoyed the end product.