Raspberry Cheesecake Cookies

I'm not one for buying cookies (ok, mint oreos excepted), given how much I like to make them, but this spring I bought a cookie at Subway just because of its unusual and tempting flavor-- raspberry cheesecake. Cheesecake in a cookie?! It was delicious but, sadly, a seasonal item. So I set out to make them myself, but I had to make a few modifications. Using cream cheese in a cookie produces a cake-like consistency, and I definitely like my cookies chewy rather than cakey. To get the cheesecake flavor without using actual cream cheese, these cookies use cheesecake flavored pudding mix. These cookies also use real raspberries, rather than raspberry jam bits (which is what Subway's appeared to use). The downside to real raspberries is that they're inevitably going to streak the dough a bit, even given the most careful mixing, but the taste of real raspberries is probably worth the occasional blue-tinged cookie.

White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake Cookies

½ cup butter (1 stick), softened

½ cup shortening

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

2 ¼ cups flour

1 package Jello cheesecake pudding mix

1 ½ cups white chocolate chips

1 cup frozen raspberries

Directions:

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream butter, shortening, and sugars until fluffy.

2. Add eggs and vanilla; mix well.  In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and pudding mix.  Add dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/egg mixture and mix until incorporated.

3. Place raspberries in a food processor and pulse until chopped. Stir the raspberries and white chocolate chips into the cookie dough with a wooden spoon.

4. Drop dough by tablespoons onto ungreased cookie sheets and bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes, or until the edges are set. Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheet for about 5 minutes and then remove to wire racks to cool.