A Gilt Nutmeg

I love Oatmeal Raisin cookies.  “Love” may even be an understatement.  While other more flashy cookies may temporarily steal my attention, I will always come back home to Oatmeal Raisin.  Soft yet chewy, full of oats, raisins and spices…you really just can’t beat a good one of these.  When it came time to start baking my own Oatmeal Raisin cookies, I consulted the two sources I trust most: Cooks Illustrated and the back of the Quaker Oats Oatmeal canister.  Surprisingly enough, Cooks tells you immediately that the recipe Quaker Oats provides is pretty near spot on, with only minor tweaks-high praise from CI!  My only hesitation was that CI proceeded to take out most of the spices that I love, so I went back to Quaker’s recipe for help and remedied that.  The resulting cookie is incredible:  big, fluffy, chewy and I love being able to pick out the little specks of spice on the top of the cookie- dark brown nutmeg, light brown cinnamon and black vanilla beans.  Interestingly, I found these taste best after they “rest” for a day or even two days after baking; I don’t know the theory behind this, but just trust me.  These are outrageously simple to make and my sister and I both agree that they qualify as breakfast food (oats…raisins…yes).  So with that, I share with you my favorite cookie recipe of all time…

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Adapted from Cooks Illustrated and Quaker Oats
Makes approximately 20 large cookies

• 2 sticks unsalted butter (1/2 pound), softened but still firm
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste (or substitute extract)
• 1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 cup raisins (or if you really love raisins, go up to 1 1/2 cups)
• 1/2 teaspoon table salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 3 cups rolled oats

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter until completely softened, 2-3 minutes.
3. Add brown and white sugar and beat an additional 3 minutes, until fluffy.
4. Add in vanilla and the eggs, one at a time, making sure they are fully incorporated after each one.
5. In a separate medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, nutmeg and cinnamon.
6. Using a wooden spoon, stir the dry mixture into the butter-sugar mixture until fully combined.
7. Add in the oats and raisins to the batter and stir with the wooden spoon until both are incorporated evenly into the dough.
8. Line baking sheets with parchment paper and form about twenty 2″ balls on the baking sheets.
9. Bake until the very edges of the cookies turn golden brown but no longer, about 20-22 minutes.  The cookies will look too light on top, but trust me.
10. Let the cookies cool for 5 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring cookies to a cooling rack.

I make sure to keep a light heart on this blog and, since the topic is food, it’s not hard to do.  But I want to say that 2011 was a tough year for many people close to me and the hardest year of all was likely for my dear friend Erin and her family.  Her father was simultaneously diagnosed with stomach cancer and prostate cancer and the strength this tight-knit family has shown in spite of it all is awe-inspiring.

The hardest part about stomach cancer is that eating is of much less interest than it was before.  I can’t imagine such an important part of my life as food or eating suddenly being unpleasant and difficult to accomplish and it’s this very reason that stomach cancer is one of the most trying types of cancers to deal with.

In a bid to spread some holiday cheer and good will to a family that so much deserves it, I wanted to bake cookies but feared Erin’s dad wouldn’t be able to enjoy them.  I was assured that he does get cravings so I set about making cookies that would satisfy any craving that might pop up-sweet, salty, soft, crunchy.  The resulting cookies won’t win any beauty contests, but boy do they sure hit the spot.  They have chocolate, peanut butter, Reese’s peanut butter cups and buttery pretzels all rolled into one.

I hear tell the whole family enjoyed them, including Erin’s dad-which is exactly what I had hoped for.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Pretzel Cookies

Adapted from Annie’s Eats

• 1½ cups plus 2 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 6 tbsp. Dutch-process cocoa
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• ½ tsp. coarse salt
• ¾ stick (6 tbsp.) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• ¼ cup plus 2 tbsp. creamy peanut butter
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2 tbsp. milk
• 1 bag of coarsely chopped mini peanut butter cups **see first step before chopping
• 1 cup of pretzels (I used “Butter Snaps”), broken

1. Start by throwing the bag of peanut butter cups into the freezer.  Annie, being the kitchen genius that she is, figured out that this makes unwrapping and chopping much much easier.  Heat the oven to 350 degrees and line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. In an extra bowl, mix the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt.
3. In a separate bowl, use an electric mixer to beat the butter, sugar and peanut butter for 1-2 minutes.  Add in the egg, vanilla extract, and milk and beat until incorporated.
4. On low speed, add the mixed dry ingredients to the wet mixture until fully incorporated.
5. Add the pretzel pieces and fold in with a spatula.  If you’re short on time, just dump in all the chopped peanut butter cups and fold them in as well with a spatula.  If you want to make the cookies a little prettier, divide the cups in half, fold the first half into the batter and save the other half to press into the tops of the cookies later before baking.
6. Drop large spoonfuls of the dough (Annie suggests about 3 tablespoons worth; I used my 2″ ice cream/cookie dough scoop) on to the prepared baking sheets.  My dough was a bit crumbly, no doubt due to the massive amount of “add-ins” to the dough.  Just press the dough mounds back together if they’re falling apart.  If you saved any peanut butter cups, press those gently into the tops of each cookie now.
7. Bake for 12-14 minutes and take out, even if they look a little underdone.  Let cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes and then transfer to a wire cooling rack.

Like I said, 2011 was a bit of a tough year, but here’s hoping that 2012 brings health and happiness to Erin’s family.

Whew, what a trip The Great Food Blogger Holiday Cookie Swap 2011 has been!  Organized by Love and Olive Oil and The Little Kitchen, cookies were flying all over the country as they were shipped from one food blogger to another- 22,000 cookies were in transit worldwide last week!

I spent quite a while trying to decide what cookies I wanted to send-something that would be sturdy enough for travel, that would stay fresh, and was fun to make and receive.  I was in one of those situations where you have a lot of recipes that sound okay, but nothing really strikes you until that one special recipe comes seemingly out of no where and there’s no question that that’s your recipe.

I’ve always liked cookies & cream ice cream and when I saw this recipe my first thought was “that sounds AWESOME” and then my second thought was “that sounds awfully redundant, to put cookies in cookies” but my first thought quickly came back and my cookie swap cookie was decided: Cookies & Cream Cookies it is!  I hope that Brooke of Baking with Basil (North Carolina), Jessica of My Cooking Adventures (North Dakota), and Sofie of The German Foodie (Ohio) have enjoyed these fun cookies-it tastes just like eating cookies & cream ice cream!  They’ll be perfect for a Christmas party (for kids and adults alike) or to put out for Santa with a glass of milk!

• 1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
• 6 tbsp sugar
• 6 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 12 Oreos, broken up into small pieces (I put mine in a large ziploc bag with the air squeezed out and beat them with a rolling pin on the floor-I’m sure my neighbors in the apartment below me weren’t too pleased with this)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together the butter and both sugar about 3 minutes, until fluffy.
3. Add egg and vanilla to butter and sugar, beat until combined.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt.
5. With your mixer on low, add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in 4 parts, beating just until combined.
6. With a spatula, gently fold in the Oreo pieces until fully incorporated in the batter.
7. Using about a 2″ wide ice cream/cookie dough scoop, scoop the batter on to an ungreased cookie sheet, leaving 2″ between scoops on the sheet.
8. Bake until just barely beginning to brown on the edges-if you bake them for too long, they lose that “cookies & cream ice cream” look because they won’t just be black and white, they’ll be black, white, and brown.
9. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes.  If you don’t, they will stick the the sheet and bunch up in front of your spatula as you try to work it underneath the cookies.  Then transfer the cookies to a wire cooling rack to finish cooling all the way.

As I said before, these are great to bake ahead of time and leave out for Santa with some milk.  I actually baked mine last Sunday (over a week ago), shipped the cookies off on Monday and threw 4 of them into a tupperware container to take photos of for the blog.  I got busy and had to go out of town so I thought well, they’ll be stale when I get back but at least they’ll still look good for the photos.  Can you believe that over a week later these cookies still were perfectly crunchy-soft just like they were fresh off the cooling rack?  What a great recipe!

I have to send out a big thank you to the bloggers who sent ME delicious cookies!  I got delicious Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies from Nicki at Nick-Stirs and some fantastic Cranberry Orange Pecan cookies from Kimberly at Rhubarb and Honey, both of which disappeared quickly between me, The Boyfriend, and my roommate.  And somewhere, out there in California, Stephanie’s Gingersnaps with Chai Icing and Crystalized Ginger (from Life Tastes Like Food) are floating around lost in mail-limbo.  They haven’t hit my mailbox yet, but considering chai is one of my favorite flavors of all time, I’m pretty sure that these won’t even make it upstairs and that the next day, our post-lady is going to wonder why there are crumbs underneath the mailboxes.

A shout-out to Ace of The Toasted Sprinkle, who turned into one giant stress-ball over the Cookie Swap and bombarded me with panicked text messages for weeks, but turned out absolutely delicious sounding cookies in the end (See?  It all worked out!  You need some relaxing lavender bath salts for Christmas…)

And finally, a huge thank you to Lindsay of Love and Olive Oil and Julie of The Little Kitchen for all the hard work they put into organizing the whole swap-it was such a fun way to start off the holiday baking!  If you’re interested in participating in next year’s cookie swap, click this link here.