Baked Sunday Mornings: Oatmeal Cherry Nut Cookies

The recipe on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule this week is "Oatmeal Cherry Nut Cookies." I made these cookies in late 2017, but with dried cranberries instead of dried cherries. You can read my prior post about the cookies here. Since I deviated slightly from the recipe before, I decided to make it again with cherries, exactly as written.

The cookies contain butter, granulated sugar, dark brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, oats, dried tart cherries, and walnuts. A while ago I switched from buying pre-ground nutmeg and cardamom to grating and grinding them myself. It really does make a huge difference. Plus, it's a breeze to grate nutmeg using a Microplane. It is a bit tedious to remove cardamon seeds from the pods and grind them with a mortar and pestle, but I'm happy to do it for the much improved flavor.
The recipe instructs you to chill the dough for six hours before shaping and baking the cookies. I left mine in the fridge for a full day since I baked these in the middle of the week and I didn't have a six-hour stretch of free time. I used a #24 scoop and got 31 cookies from a batch of dough. I flattened the dough just slightly before baking the cookies and they didn't spread much in the oven. My cookies looked quite different from the last time I baked them. This time they didn't spread much and were puffed and rotund; I thought they looked better. And I loved them. The thick cookies were chewy and the flavor from the nutmeg and cardamom flavor was unusual and delicious. I love tart cherries and I really enjoyed all the different textures in these cookies from the fruit, walnuts, and oats.

The cherries and spices make these quite different from your run-of-the-mill oatmeal cookies, but the gentlemen bakers' creative update on a classic is just lovely.

Recipe: "Oatmeal Cherry Nut Cookies" from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Post: "Baked Sunday Mornings: Oatmeal Cherry (or Cranberry) Nut Cookies," November 5, 2017.

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