first four
In the past couple weeks I’ve talked to two different friends who both claim that the best cookies they’ve ever had were no bake cookies. The idea of no bake cookies was sounding really good to me because (a) the most fun part of cookie making is the stirring and all that, not the baking and (b) the heat from the oven plus summer heat plus lack of air conditioning can add up to some seriously unpleasant heat trapped in our upstairs bedroom on cookie nights.
But alas… despite my super advanced planning by asking for the recipes at least 12 hours before I needed them neither of these supposed best cookie recipes have materialized. Anyways, I looked around online and apparently there is a very popular no bake cookie recipe which sounds a lot like the one my friend Alex was talking about. So I will try it out and she can tell me if it looks right or not.
first four at a boil
Recipe:
- 1/2 cup butter
- 2 cups sugar
- 4 Tbsp. cocoa powder
- 1/2 cup milk
- 1/2 cup peanut butter
- 2 tsp. vanilla
- 3 cups dry quick set oats
Here’s the thing about no bake cookies. Instead of baking them, you cook them on the stove. I thought this was cheating a little because cooking and baking are very similar. But I guess until I can find a way to get cocoa powder, sugar, milk, and butter to turn into chocolate without heating it up (blender?), I’m stuck with cooking.
check out the new camera
So you put the first 4 ingredients in a large pot and bring them to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, not more! Then remove from heat and mix in the next 3 ingredients. I decided to add the vanilla and peanut butter first because that seemed to make the most sense. But maybe it doesn’t matter. The peanut butter and vanilla mix in pretty easily.
Then you just spoon the batter onto parchment paper and let it cool and harden. Even when it’s cool, it’s not 100% hardened, it’s a little mushy. Oh well.
Personally, I like these cookies but I think they’re a little too sweet. Maybe next time I will cut down the sugar to 1 1/2 cups or so.
P.S. There are many copies of this recipe on the internet, but one of them claims that these cookies are healthy. Apparently the oats and peanut butter give this cookie a low glycemic index. Just tell yourself that while you’re eating them.
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.