Cookie of the Week

Dandy Candy Oatmeal Cookies

12 oz creamy peanut butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 butter flavored Crisco Stick
3 eggs
3/4 tsp vanilla
3/4 tsp maple syrup
4 ½ cups quick oats, uncooked
2 tsp baking soda
8 oz M&M’s

1. Heat oven to 350F. Grease baking sheet with shortening. Place sheets of foil on countertop for cooling cookies.
2. Combine peanut butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and shortening in large bowl. Beat at medium speed of electric mixer until well blended and fluffy. Add eggs, vanilla and maple syrup. Beat at high speed 3 to 4 minutes. Add 2 ½ cups oats and baking soda; stir. Stir in candy. Stir in remaining 2 ½ cups oats. Shape dough into 1 ½ inch balls. Flatten slightly. Place 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheet.
3. Bake for 9 to 10 minutes for chewy cookies or 11 to 12 minutes for crispy cookies. Cool 2 minutes. Remove cookies to foil to cool completely.

Makes 3 ½ dozen cookies

Nearly every week I make cookies to bring to church. I'll be posting my selection for the week on the sidebar (under the menu). This week I made one of my favorites. It is a recipe out of my very first cookie cookbook, The Cookie Bible. My mom bought it for me shortly after Tyler and I got married and this was actually the first recipe I tried out of it. The name is arduously long so Tyler just calls them "molassie cookies" (although I have no idea where the name came from since there is no molasses in them).

I've made these cookies a couple of times for church already (when it's close to a holiday and I'm feeling lazy I just use the holiday-colored M&M's to make "holiday" cookies). I've noticed in all the stacking that is involved in transporting them to church that these tend to be a little crumbly. This week I used one of the tips I picked up from the magazine I've been reading lately (Cooks Illustrated) to correct this issue.

The ingredients:



The switch up: I heard that increasing the brown to white sugar ratio would make the cookies chewier. I kept the total amount of sugar in the recipe at 2 cups but I increased the brown sugar to 1 1/3 cups and decreased the granulated sugar to 2/3 cup. This is after I've creamed together the sugars with shortening and peanut butter.


Here is the finished dough.


The recipe says to roll the dough into 1 1/2 inch balls and flatten. I'm not really good at judging how big a ball of dough is (without getting out a ruler which just seems silly). My inability to eyeball 1 1/2 inches did result in significantly more cookies than the recipe touts. We actually ended up making 5 1/2 dozen instead of 3 1/2; I like my cookies a little smaller though, so I probably won't change this next time.

Here are all the cookies that survived past the tasting testing phase. We were trying to figure out precisely how long to bake them. Tip: Bake cookies one sheet at a time. It takes longer but results in a superior product. Since you are able to place the sheet in the center of the oven (instead of one on the top rack and another on the bottom), the cookies bake evenly top to bottom. Turning the sheet in the middle of the baking time will further ensure even baking.

Tyler and I did most of the taste testing but Addilyn helped as well. We decided that the third dozen was just about perfect. I baked that dozen for 9 minutes, 15 seconds and turned the sheet just a little past half way through. Those cookies came out extra chewy and moist. If you like your cookies crunchier than you'll want to keep them in longer; the longest batch was somewhere around 10 minutes and was nice and crunchy on the outside but still chewy in the center.

The final product: Here is the stack of cookies right before I wrapped them to go to church. They sat, covered, overnight and were very good when I served them. We did notice that they seemed to have more peanut butter flavor today than they did yesterday. I would say that the sugar adjustment was a success because the cookies definitely crumbled less even when handled by the tough crowd at church.