Milk & Cookies

See? Even the cow wants to eat it.

This week was my turn for cookies, but the beginning of the week was pretty tiring and I never had a really inspiring cookie idea. So I re-used a recipe that I had tried a month or two ago: cherry chocolate oatmeal cookies. The recipe is from Joy the Baker. I modified it because I don’t believe in white chocolate, so I just used regular chocolate. I also don’t believe in only putting 1 cup of chocolate chips in cookies. That is definitely not enough chocolate. So I put 1 1/2 cups. Believe me, I wanted to put a whole bag, but I thought with the cherries that would probably be too much. I managed to hold back.

The great thing about these cookies is that they are “healthy”. That is, I have no idea what the nutritional information is, but the fact that they have oatmeal in them is enough for me to consider them a breakfast food. Baking cookies every week is really adding up, we constantly have leftovers at home. So if I can eat them for breakfast, that helps a lot.

Anyways, onto the cookies. Here’s the recipe.

• 8 oz unsalted butter
• 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups old fashioned oats
• 1 cup dried cherries
• 1 1/2 cup chocolate chips

You know the drill. These cookies are much like any others. Preheat oven to 350 C. Cream sugar into butter. Add vanilla and eggs, mix. Stir in dry ingredients (mix them together first – flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon). Mix in oats, cherries, and chocolate chips. Bake 10-12 minutes or until the tops look brown.

Ta-da!

These cookies were definitely better the second time around. The first time I made a few mistakes. One was failing to mix everything in well enough. The first time around, there was a bit of batter at the bottom that didn’t really get enough oats mixed in. Without the oats, the batter doesn’t hold together very well and then kind of caramelizes, so there were some cookies with funny brown splotches on them. Actually, I still thought these parts tasted okay… Second mistake was using very large dried cherries. Different brands come in different sizes. The second time around I used smaller cherries, and I think the result was much better. A very large dried cherry kind of overwhelms your taste buds. I think I also put more chocolate chips in this time, but I’m not sure. In case you couldn’t guess… more chocolate means better cookies in my opinion. Yum.