Friday, June 8, 2007

Fantastic Cookies!

Since it's the last week of school this week, all the summer birthdays are being celebrated in Abigail's class. They have about 10 summer birthdays, so there's been a lot of snacking going on in her class. She decided that she wanted me to make a cookie that had M&M's in it, and that got me thinking. The cookie I usually make with M&M's is a monster cookie, but that calls for an insane amount of ingredients, and peanut butter. I've just not been in the mood for peanut butter lately. A few months ago I created the Mutant Munchies, which are very good, but not something that I thought a bunch of sugar-crazy first graders would be thrilled about. I decided on oatmeal. That was a flavor I could get behind and get excited about, but a search brought up very little and I needed to come up with my own cookie.

I started with the recipe for monster cookies as inspiration combined with my mutant munchie recipe. As I looked at all the oatmeal in a monster cookie recipe, I really concentrated my thoughts on how I could hide the oatmeal. How could I get its flavor in the cookie without screaming "look at me! I'm a more healthy oatmeal cookie!". So I ground the oats in the blender. Essentially, I replaced the oats in the cookie with oat flour. I finished adding ingredients, and thought my dough was just a tad on the dry side, but once everything was in, I figured it was too late to add more butter or another egg. I used a generous cookie scoop to scoop out portions of dough (an 1/8 cup) and then flattened the balls slightly with my hand, I wasn't sure how they'd spread.

The end cookie was perfect. Truly perfection, the type of cookie I would expect to pay for when buying a cookie from a bakery. The oatmeal flavor really came through and the chocolate chips and M&M's really played off each other well. Every once in a while you'd get a bite of cookie with a little extra caramel flavor from the toffee bits. They were the perfect size- one cookie was plenty to satisfy without being too much, but a second cookie didn't overwhelm either. The cookies got packaged up two to a person for school, and according to Abigail, everyone loved them. I know we did, since there is only one or two left. M&M Oatmeal Cookies are pretty darn close to perfection and a new favorite of my soon-to-be second grader.

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