Recipe Review--Chewy Chocolate-Raisin Cookies By Martha

I spotted this recipe for ooey-gooey-and-chewy chocolate raisin cookies awhile ago in a Martha magazine. I have been sort of into the combination of raisins and chocolate lately. It's not something I would consider a really delicious combination, since I'm not a huge raisin fan, but then I remember eating Raisinettes by the pound as a child. They are SO good, and raisins + chocolate is pretty much great any way you slice it.
It was between this recipe and Dorie Greenspan's Raisin Brownies, which are also due for a trial run in my kitchen. But having just made brownies a few days ago that I sent to a friend, I thought cookies would vary things up a bit.
This is a unique recipe--no eggs, and instead of two sticks of butter you have one stick (half a cup) and then half a cup of honey, in addition to half a cup of brown sugar. What this does is to give plenty of sweetness (duh) but also, sugar replaces the fat that would tenderize the dough. A standard chocolate chip cookie dough has two sticks of butter, but not so here. It's just like in the 90's, when everything became low-fat, but no one lost any weight? The cookie manufacturers replaced the fat with sugar because it functions in a similar way. Although it has just as many calories (compare a box of low-fat Oreos to the original and you'll see) and is actually worse for you, because the fat will keep you fuller longer than sugar will.
Sorry, didn't mean to go off on a nutritional tangent there...but it's true. In this cookie, the honey is not meant to lower the fat, but to increase the chewiness, because any type of syrup (honey, molasses in brown sugar, etc) will make for a chewier cookie. The syrups are hygroscopic, and attract water, keeping them soft. This recipe uses an astonishing 1/2 cup of honey. Chewy it is.
It also omits any egg. What an egg will do in a cookie recipe is provide structure (from the proteins) and therefore lift. It will be a more cakey product, less dense, if you add an egg or two. Since the recipe writer wanted a flat cookie, no egg is used.
The cookie dough has Dutched cocoa, making it deep, dark and very chocolate-y. It also throws in some raisins soaked in brandy, and white chocolate. I did deviate here-I had no brandy, and also haven't ever tried brandy, so I wasn't sure about the taste. I thought of using dark rum but I was also fresh out! So I just used water to rehydrate them, and added vanilla to the dough. It will change the flavor if you use the brandy, but the flavor isn't really a problem. It tasted pretty good.
I just wan;t sure about the texture. It was really chewy, as promised. But sort of odd...I can't describe it. The big chunks of raisins were a little unpleasant here. I liked that it was chewy, but maybe not so chewy! I liked the crackle of the raw sugar on the outside. Like I said, flavors were good-just the texture bugged me.
So, I will leave it at that. A decent recipe if that's what you like. I may tinker here and there with the concept of a Raisinette Cookie, because I believe it's a great idea. We'll see!

You can find the recipe for them here on Martha Stewart.com...I'm not going to repost this one, since it's wasn't truly fantastic.