Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (p. 768)

I have a never-ending love for oatmeal cookies. When I was a child, my mother and I used to make them constantly. In fact, in Campfire in elementary school we were supposed to write down all the ingredients and steps of a recipe from memory, and then compare it to the real recipe. Everyone's recipes were extremely wrong--except mine. I forgot baking soda and my temperature was slightly off. That's how often we made them.

I was optimistic about Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (p. 768) because although I know that dried fruit is delicious in oatmeal cookies, Josh disagrees. My previous TJOC oatmeal cookies had been pretty good, although I like my oatmeal cookies cakey rather than crisp, so they weren't ideal.

The recipe was essentially the same as the one linked above except it had no cinnamon or nutmeg (hooray! I don't like cinnamon!) and used chocolate chips instead of raisins:



They were flat but not as flat as the original oatmeal cookies.



They were good! They also stayed soft, which was nice. I still think they needed nuts to be truly tasty but I deferred to Josh's hatred of nuts in cookies because I knew I wouldn't eat them all.

So what do you think? What do you like in your oatmeal cookies? Raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, other?

Random facts:
  • Oatmeal is common in Scottish cooking because oats were far more suited to the wet growing season in Scotland than corn or wheat (Wikipedia). Haggis, anyone?
  • Oats can be eaten cooked or raw (Wikipedia). I guess I knew this but I never thought about it. I eat raw oats in granola or on bread relatively often.
  • There is no actual Quaker connection for Quaker Oats. The original marketers at QO thought the image of a Quaker man holding a scroll that read "pure" represented "integrity, quality, and honesty" (Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (p. 487).


Add to Technorati Favorites

3 comments:

  1. I don't think I've ever had an oatmeal cookie but they seems to be somewhat similar to ANZAC biscuits?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know! What are ANZAC biscuits? Are oatmeal cookies not common in other countries? I would say that oatmeal cookies are easily within the most common three types of cookies in the US (along with chocolate chip and peanut butter).

    ReplyDelete
  3. ANZAC buscuits are traditional Australian biscuits which were sent over to the troops during WW1.

    This recipes claims to be for chewy biscuits (way better than the crispy ones IMO):

    Makes about 24
    Ingredients

    * 1 cup (150g) plain flour
    * 1 cup (90g) rolled oats
    * 1 cup (85g) Ward McKenzie desiccated coconut
    * 3/4 cup (155g) brown sugar
    * 125g butter
    * 2 tbs golden syrup
    * 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

    Method

    1. Preheat the oven to 160°C. Line two baking trays with non-stick baking paper. Sift the flour into a large bowl. Stir in the oats, coconut and brown sugar.

    2. Put the butter, golden syrup and 2 tbs water in a small saucepan. Stir over a medium heat until melted. Stir in the bicarbonate of soda.

    3. Pour the butter mixture into the flour mixture and stir until combined.

    4. Roll level tablespoons of mixture into balls. Place on the trays, about 5cm apart.

    5. Press with a fork to flatten slightly. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown.

    6. Set aside on the trays for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack so it cools completely.

    ReplyDelete

I love comments! Please let me know what you think!

I'm really sorry, I hate comment moderation, but I've been getting annoying Japanese spam messages lately so...comment moderation has started.