oatmeal cookies
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all-purpose flour      450   g
dry milk                60   g
baking soda              1/2 tbsp
baking powder            1/2 tbsp
cinnamon               1 3/4 tsp
unsweetened cocoa      2     tbsp
salt                   a ceremonial amount

butter                 2 1/4 cup (4 1/2 sticks)
brown sugar            185   g
granulated sugar       290   g

large eggs             3
vanilla                2     tsp

oats                   4 1/4 cup
walnuts                1 1/2 cup
M&Ms                   400   g

Allow the butter to soften so it's easy to mix in the sugars. My favorite method is to take your largest mixing bowl, the one you'll be using for the cookie dough. Remove the sticks (and the half stick) from their wrappers and place them in the bowl. Place this bowl in the oven and fire up the oven for about 115 seconds. (Adjust the 115 seconds through your own experience.) Then turn off the oven and let the butter sit for a few hours.

Mix dry ingredients together. Set aside.

Mix butter and sugars together.

Into that, mix the eggs and vanilla. Then mix in the dry ingredients.

Grind the oats with a miniature food processor. Once upon a time, I tried using store-bought oat flour instead. But after baking, cookie texture was all wrong.

Moment of truth. Do you mix in the oats with the hand mixer, or with your hands? I've found several hand mixers whose packaging announced that they were strong enough for oatmeal cookies. Lies, most of the time. Try it and see. Mix in the oats with your hand mixer if you dare. Otherwise use your fingers. I've ruined a couple of hand mixers this way.

But. I finally (2022) bought a Black & Decker hand mixer, model MX610, which seems over-engineered; but there's no such thing as an over-engineered hand mixer, and this one is equal to the task of mixing in the oats. But just barely.

After adding the oats, definitely abandon the hand mixer and go with your fingers.

Mix in the walnuts. Break them into pieces as small as your fingers can make them. Or go cheap and buy the walnuts bits instead of halves, if you can find them in the store. Either way works. Don't use a food processor; it grinds them too fine. You want some texture here.

Mix in the M&Ms. Be a sport and pick out the blue ones. Get rid of 'em. Contrary to the latest scientific findings, a little chocolate won't hurt the dawg none.

350 degrees, about 18 minutes. Your kilometerage, and oven, may vary; in my previous oven, that would have been 14 minutes.

NOTES:

Salt or no salt? Your choice. Salted butter or unsalted butter? Your choice. I prefer no salt at all in these cookies.

I like to open the eggs into a separate, very small bowl rather than straight into the dough. That makes it easier to fish out tiny bits of eggshell.

If a bit of eggshell is in the small bowl, you can chase it out by scraping it up the side of the bowl with the side of an ordinary table-style teaspoon.

For placing the cookies on the cookie sheet, I recommend using a 3 tablespoon ice cream scoop, the kind with a curved blade inside the scoop to release the content easily.

Sun Jun 25 16:39:51 PDT 2023