TracyFood

Recipe: Oatmeal Raisin Cookies 10 July 2008 6:44 pm

Posted by Tracy in : baking, dessert, recipes, vegetarian , trackback

Someday I will make a batch of these side by side with a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and try to determine once and for all which is my favorite, but today is not that day. You see, readers, I just used up our oats on a miniature batch of Tracy granola, and because we’re moving pretty soon, I may not restock. No, seriously — it’s hard for me to believe, but we’re out of oats. We’ve been refilling the same cardboard tube that once held Quaker Oats since probably 2002, and it’s probably silly to move it to New York (though at the same time oddly tempting). One particularly precious part of the oft-reused container is this recipe, the one under the lid, which over the years has served us very well indeed. So I am recording it here and in my spiral notebook of recipes I never want to forget, just in case I manage to overcome my obsessive-compulsive packrat tendencies and actually — gasp! — throw something out.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Note: The recipe claims to make about 4 dozen cookies, but I like them a little bigger than that so it’s usually more like 3 dozen, and they go FAST (even faster if you divide the whole recipe in half, which works just fine).

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup granulated sugar (I like the hippie unbleached kind)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour (1 3/4 cups at high altitudes, not that I’d know)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt (1 teaspoon kosher, and the recipe claims this is optional but they’re wrong)
3 cups oats (old-fashioned, not quick, dangit!)
1 cup raisins

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. (It occurs to me that I should convert this recipe to weights and especially metric measures one of these days.) In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.

Next, beat together margarine and sugars until creamy; add eggs, one at a time, and vanilla; mix well. Add the contents of the dry ingredients bowl (y’know, flour and everything except for oats and raisins) and mix well again. Finally, add the oats and raisins, and mix well. The batter will be heck of thick and that’s okay.

Form cookies: rounded tablespoons of batter on as many baking sheets as you need; there’s no need to grease them, although parchment paper is fun and easy.

Bake the cookies 10 to 12 minutes, until golden brown (I usually turn them after 5 minutes just in case the oven’s being wonky).

After removing cookies from the oven (better underdone than over, unless you really don’t trust your eggs, in which case you should really get better ones next time), let them cool on the sheet for a minute or so before peeling them off and letting them cool further on a wire rack. I won’t even pretend we have the self-control to let them get to room temperature, but I do sincerely wish everybody who reads this freedom from cookie-burned mouths.

Good luck and happy cookie-baking!