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.