Beer Cookies?!

Well we've been back for almost a week now from our amazing trip to the UK. We traveled to Ireland, Scotland, and England and slept in 9 cities in 14 days. In Ireland, Guinness is THE drink. Well not really...there are so many beers you could choose from but Guinness is probably one of their more world famous ones. In fact a huge holiday there is "Arthur's Day" to celebrate Arthur Guinness in September.

I'm not the biggest fan of Guinness. I do like it in a Snake Bite-half Guinness half cider but other than that, it's not my beverage of choice. On our trip we made it to the Guinness Factory in Dublin. My brother and I learned how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness and Tim got his pint up in the Sky Bar complete with a shamrock design in the head. We also ate at their "pub" restaurant in which their special featured Guinness as an ingredient. Tim and my bro got that which was a traditional Irish beef stew. I got the traditional Irish vegetable soup (I must have gotten this soup like 5 times during our trip it's so good! Maybe I'll try making that next).

So much Guinness inspired me, believe it or not, to try a Guinness chocolate chip cookie recipe. I found a bunch of the same recipes on the web so tonight I visited the grocery store to grab all the ingredients including the Extra Stout Guinness and went to work. It was a long process because it included reducing two 12 ounce bottles of Guinness to 1/3 of a cup syrup stuff. In the end the results were quite scrumptious!!!

Chunky chocolate chips in a gooey chewy cookie. "Can you taste the Guinness???" is what I kept asking my taste testers aka my husband, mom and dad. Nope they said. I was a little disappointed they couldn't taste it because after all I went through this specific recipe just for that. Weird. Regardless it was a delicious cookie and I would make them again. In fact I have to make them again because I froze half the batch for another baking day. :o)