Toasted Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies

I did not think it would happen, but it did: I am sick of Halloween candy. The fact that my husband and I anticipated at least 160 trick-or-treaters and saw only six left us with a virtual ton of leftover candy beckoning to us from our Spiderman Halloween buckets. And I have eaten much, much more of it than I wish to admit. It has been delicious, but its sugary sweetness left me with a craving for a deeper, more satisfying dessert experience.

Such as homemade chocolate chip cookies.

Toasted coconut chocolate chip cookies, to be precise.

Yesterday, I decided that I was finally going to bake some cookies that did not have leftover Reese's peanut butter cups in them. I was longing for a cookie that was both chewy and crispy, dense but not overly fluffy. I found this recipe for chocolate chip cookies over at the smitten kitchen (my very favorite food blog of all time). I ransacked the baking cupboard in search of nuts, but only came up with a bag of coconut flakes. Unaltered, I find coconut flakes to be a little on the sweet, chewy side, and I was going for crunchy...

...so I toasted them.

That nasty looking concoction at top right is my simmer pot, which was brewing a spicy blend of orange rinds, a cinnamon stick, four cardamom pods, and eight whole cloves.

I subbed the coconut for the nuts called for in the sk recipe.

Goooolden browwwn cookie perfection!

To try this at home: First, toast 1 1/2 cups of coconut flakes in a skillet over medium heat. Stir the coconut frequently until it begins to brown, then constantly until it looks like the second coconut picture above. Then, follow the directions in the original recipe, but substitute the coconut flakes for the nuts. Or keep the nuts and the coconut flakes, which I will be doing next time. Another substitution I made: these cookies demand serious chocolate, so I used Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chips.

Mmm... cookies, milk, and SEC football on ESPN3.