Eats: Farmhouse Oatmeal Cookies

Hello! As I browsed among the stalls at the local farmers' market this morning, I noticed that there were at least two or three vendors selling cookies. That reminded me that I'd been wanting to try a particular oatmeal-raisin cookie recipe in a community cookbook I'd gotten awhile back (thrift store purchase).

I happen to love oatmeal-raisin cookies but the rest of my immediate family doesn't. However, they already had their own desserts: my husband's box of chocolates (a Father's Day gift) and our daughter's batch of snickerdoodles (a birthday treat I'd baked for her). I was the only one in the house without a goodie - oh, the horror of it! So it was a good time to make a cookie they don't like.

Farmhouse Oatmeal Cookies (recipe courtesy of the Helping Hands Society cookbook; Sue Mys, contributor)

2 cups flour 
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup butter, softened
1 1/4 cups brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
1/4 cup molasses
1 1/2 cups quick-cooking oatmeal
1 cup raisins (see notes below)
1 cup walnuts (see notes below)

Stir together first 5 ingredients and set aside. Cream butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs and molasses. Stir in flour mixture, oatmeal, raisins and nuts. 

Drop by 1/4 cupfuls 3 inches apart on greased baking sheet. Flatten with bottom of drinking glass which is greased and dipped in white sugar. Bake at 350-375 about 12 minutes. 

Notes: I used walnuts, and I toasted them lightly before adding them to the recipe. My husband doesn't like raisins, which is why he doesn't like oatmeal-raisin cookies. Oh, and he doesn't like nuts in baked goods either. But leave out those two ingredients, add chocolate chips and coconut instead - and he'd gobble these up. 

Thus, feel free to add other dried fruits, any baking chip, etc. to this recipe. (If I was making a variation with chocolate chips, I'd omit the cinnamon, as I don't care for the taste of those two ingredients together. I'd add a teaspoon of vanilla instead. But that's me.)

Yes, a quarter cup of cookie dough is a bit on the large side, but on the other hand most of the cookies I saw at the farmers' market looked like they were made with that much dough, if not more (depending on the vendor). Sometimes bigger is better, so I followed the recipe as it was written. But feel free to make them smaller if you prefer.

As for that baking temperature range: since these are big cookies, I decided to try the 375 temperature. This was fine; the cookies were neither too soft or too hard once cooled. 

Although I've included the full-size recipe here, I actually made a half recipe, which yielded nine cookies that look just like this:

This recipe turned out great - very easy and fast to mix up, and I liked that they didn't really spread during the baking process. They looked as nice coming out of the oven as they did going in.

As for the taste - well, I'm not sorry the rest of my family doesn't like them, as that means more for me!