Baked Sunday Mornings: Old-School Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love making elaborate desserts, but I also love baking big, cookie jar-style cookies. And that's what's on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule this week: "Old-School Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies." Although the name might be a misnomer, because this recipe is a little different from your basic oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe.

First, the recipe incorporates several different texture of oats. You use some oats whole, but you run a portion of the oats through a food processor to yield a mix of fine and coarse pieces. Second, the recipe  also includes some unexpected (at least for me) ingredients, including bourbon, molasses, and heavy cream. And finally, the dough needs to needs to rest in the refrigerator before baking.

But the recipe is still quite easy to make. You mix cold shortening and cold cubed butter; add sugar, dark brown sugar, bourbon, vanilla, and molasses; beat with egg, egg yolk, and heavy cream until light and fluffy; add all of the dry ingredients (all-purpose flour, bread flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, whole oats, and processed oats); and stir in chocolate chips. You need to chill the dough for at least eight hours but the recipe says that 48 hours of chilling allows the flavors to develop fully, so I waited two full days before baking.
I used a #20 scoop to form the cookies and sprinkled them with fleur de sel before baking, getting 33 cookies from a batch of dough. The recipe doesn't say anything about flattening the cookies before baking so I didn't -- and my cookies didn't flatten much during baking, leaving me with unattractive domes. I flattened them with a spatula right after taking them out of the oven and liked the resulting flat cookies with cracked tops. I also tried flattening the cookies before baking and thought that it produced less attractive, more irregularly-shaped cookies -- so I went back to the technique of just flattening the domed cookies while they were still hot.

These cookies are very tasty. They are hefty and nice and chewy (but not bendy); the different sizes of oat pieces created a texture that reminds me of shredded coconut. I couldn't taste the bourbon or molasses, but the cookies have a nice depth of flavor, including a lot of chocolate chips. I wouldn't say these oatmeal cookies are my favorite, but I would happily make and serve these delicious and sophisticated oatmeal cookies again.

Recipe: "Old-School Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies" from Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
I love the cracked tops-- very pretty! :) That's interesting about your domes, as mine flattened out enough to yield thick cookies, but they weren't domed. I'll have to keep that technique in mind for the future.