Luxury Oatmeal Cookies

Oatmeal cookies is the Alpha Bakers' assignment this week...but the oatmeal is in the form of granola, which of course you make from scratch. The result is a good cookie, but not one that wowed me. The granola is basic: rolled oats, nuts (I used pecans instead of walnuts), oil, sugars, and flavoring. The sugars are maple syrup and dark brown sugar, and I cut back a bit on the maple syrup. After the granola was toasted lightly, it got cooled down and mixed with chocolate chips (Ghirardelli 60% cacao for me) and dried cherries instead of the called-for raisins.

The granola mixture is blended with a cookie dough, then chilled to get it firm enough to shape. It's quite a soft dough, so any delay in the shaping process meant the dough needed to go back into the fridge to not end up all over my hands as I rolled balls of dough and flattened them. Baked them until just brown, and it's done.

The result is a crisp-chewy cookie that was very good when freshly baked. However, stored in an airtight container after they were completely cooled, the cookies softened and wilted a bit. You still have a nice concoction of butter-sugar-chocolate-cherries with some oatmeal to pretend it's healthy, but without that extra crispness I thought a lot of the character was lost. I don't have any other opinions on the cookies besides this: I baked the entire batch on Sunday of last week, tasted a couple, then passed the lot on to my sister-in-law with the comment that she could use them for her Tickling Tech session at her school on Friday. By the time Friday rolled around, older niece (still home for spring break) had reduced the supply below the level needed for the teachers. Guess the cookies were pretty good after all...