Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

My first un-assisted cookie success! I'm sooooo happy!!!!

My entire life, every cookie that I've baked on my own has turned out bad. Usually, the texture is more like a cake than a cookie. And usually, I'm attempting to make chocolate chip cookies.

Well, this time I decided to tackle a different type of cookie, hoping to get better results. Oatmeal raisin is classic, right? But I still wanted my chocolate, so I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies instead. It was a brilliant idea if I do say so myself, haha.

I used an oatmeal raisin recipe from Smitten Kitchen but substituted chocolate chips for raisins. It turned out soft and chewy and wonderful. Maybe I can tackle regular chocolate chip cookies next!

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen
Ingredients:
- 1 stick of unsalted butter, softened
- 2/3 cup of light brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour (I used bread flour because that's all I had in the house, and it still turned out well)
- 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt
- 1 1/2 cups of rolled oats
- 3/4 cup of chocolate chips

Directions:
- Cream the butter, brown sugar, egg and vanilla together in a bowl.
- Add the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt to the butter/sugar mixture.
- Fold in the oatmeal and chocolate chips.
- Scoop the cookies onto a lined cookie sheet, giving them plenty of space to spread, and stick them in the fridge (or freezer if you're impatient) until they're cool.
- Bake them in a 350 degree oven for 10-12 minutes. I found that they actually need more like 15 because they started off cold. Basically, you want the edges to be slightly brown and the middle to be slightly undercooked.
- Remove them from the oven and let them cool in the pan for a few minutes, then transfer them to a cooling rack to finish cooling.
- Dip them in some cold milk and indulge!

Banana Oatmeal Cookie

This time it wasn't my fault. I stopped buying bananas because they always get mushy and then I'm forced to use them for baking and I've learned my lesson. This time, I had mushy bananas because my in-laws brought them over one day and left them behind. Then, to no one's surprise, they got mushy and I had to find something to do with them.

I found this recipe on There's always thyme to cook. I really liked these cookies. They weren't overly sweet and I felt (sorta) healthy eating them since they had bananas and oatmeal. I did mess with the recipe a bit because I had 4 rotting bananas, not 3, but it still turned out fine, which is surprising because if you've followed my blog at all, you know that I suck at baking. Oh, I also kept them in the oven much longer than 12 minutes the original recipe called for because they weren't browning and came out mushy. With or without my tweaks, they were yummy and I definitely approve of this recipe.


Adapted from There's always thyme to cook
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 4 ripe bananas (the original recipe calls for 3, so 3 would probably work too)
- 2 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup chocolate chips
- 1 cup walnuts

Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
- Cream the butter, sugar and brown sugar together.
- Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
- Mix in the flour, baking soda, and cinnamon until well-combined.
- Mix in the banana, oats, walnuts and chocolate chips.
- Put spoonfuls of dough on a greased baking pan, parchment paper or silpat and bake for 12-15 minutes or until the cookies are just beginning to brown. (The original recipe says 10-12 minutes, but I found that it wasn't enough)
- Cool on a cooling rack and then share them with your friends!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Why oh why must I be cursed with an inability to bake? I have really got to be one of the worst bakers ever! Everytime I attempt some sort of baked goodie, I make a mess of it. I swear I follow the directions as precisely as I am capable of. I try, try, and try again. But I fail, fail, and fail again. Arrrrgh! But, I'm going to keep trying and hopefully one day I'll learn.

Remember that episode of Friends where Monica makes a million batches of cookies in an attempt to make the best chocolate chip cookies without any success? That's how I feel. No matter what recipe I've tried (yes including the Phoebe's mom's famous Nesele Toulouse recipe), no matter whose oven I'm using, no matter what the weather is like outside, no matter how full the moon is, or how the planets are aligned, they ALWAYS come out cakey. See those below? That's not what a cookie should look like...


The ONE time they turned out right was the time the hubz was helping me and screwed up the recipe because he didn't bother to read it carefully! They were chewy and delicious and definitely not my doing. I tried to make them again the right way the following week without his help, and guess what? CAKEY! Next time I'm going to try his messed up version, but I bet those will turn out cakey too.

Seriously, what's wrong with me?

Ok, enough wallowing in self-pity. Here's the recipe for Alton Brown's "The Chewy", aka "The Cakey" when I get my hands on it. The accidental changes that my husband made in his version, which tasted fantastic by the way, are in blue.


Ingredients:
(my hubz changes are in blue)
- 2 sticks of butter
- 2 1/4 cups of bread flour
- 1 teaspoon of kosher salt
- 1 teaspoon of baking soda
- 1/4 cup of sugar (1 c of sugar)
- 1 1/4 cup of brown sugar (1/2 c of brown sugar)
- 1 egg
- 1 egg yolk
- 2 tablespoons of milk
- 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
- 2 cups of chocolate chips

Directions:
- Melt the butter (I used a microwave).
- Add the sugar and brown sugar into the butter and cream them together.
- Add the egg, egg yolk, milk, vanilla extract and mix.
- Slowly mix in the flour, salt and baking soda until well incorporated.
- Stir in the chocolate chips.
- Chill the dough.
- Heat the oven to 375 degrees.
- Scoop the dough onto a cookie sheet and bake for 14 minutes.
- Enjoy the fact that you can make cookies that have the texture of cookies and I can't.

Banana and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Costco strikes again! We have a ginormous bag (25 whole pounds!) of flour from Costco and we're going through it surprisingly fast. I guess knowing that I have a ton of flour encourages me to bake more. I'll slowly post all the goodies that we've been making in this house as I get them written up (but I tend to be super slow about it - so I apologize in advance).

Baking still makes a bigger mess than I'd like it to, but I gotta say, it's not nearly as scary or hard as I once thought it was. The key is to follow the directions. You can't get away with eyeballing measurements, flavoring stuff "to taste", adding little extra somethings, or making substitions for things you don't have on hand or find icky like you can in cooking. Having a stand mixer definitely helps to. And I'm also getting better about cleaning up after myself as I bake like I do with cooking. Yay for me!

Now on to what I made with this big bag of flour - banana and chocolate chip cookies! I really like the combo of bananas and chocolate, so I thought this would be a great little treat to make and to use up some of the mushy bananas, plus I wanted to try an alternative use for mushy bananas besides smoothies and banana bread. It turned out pretty good for the most part. Some things to keep in mind if you want to try this are that the texture was more like a cake than a cookie as you can see below.

Another important thing is that usually with cookies you take them out before they look done and they'll firm up as they cool. With these, don't do that. My first batch was undercooked and was super mushy, and even putting them back in the oven didn't really help. It was kind of like all the banana floated to the top of the cookie and created a sticky, mushy layer on top that just wouldn't go away no matter how long I re-baked it for. I baked my second batch longer and they turned out much better (they still have the consistency of cake though).

Anyway, if you're interested in trying it, I got the recipe from Simply Recipes

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 egg, room temperature
• 1 cup of mashed bananas (about 2 ½ large bananas)
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 2 cups of flour
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace or nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves
• 1 cup of pecans (walnuts and chocolate chips are fine alternatives)

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.

2 In a bowl, mix the mashed bananas and baking soda. Let sit for 2 minutes. The baking soda will react with the acid in the bananas which in turn will give the cookies their lift and rise.

3 Mix the banana mixture into the butter mixture. Mix together the flour, salt, and spices and sift into the butter and banana mixture and mix until just combined.

4 Fold into the batter the pecans or chocolate chips if using. Drop in dollops onto parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Bake for 11-13 minutes or until nicely golden brown. Let cool on wire racks.

Makes about 30 cookies.