Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies, Starpower-Style

So my yearly kitchen experimentaion turned out marginally better than last year's foray. Maybe? You decide (you know, by reading, I wouldn't make you actually taste my creations)...

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies (well, allegedly, anyway).

The very day you were probably enjoying High Tea with undoubtedly fantastic scones, I was in my kitchen trying to master the simple cookie. Being a non-baker, I had none of the ingredients so the adventure began at the store. I thought dark chocolate chips would be a fun antioxidant-enhanced treat so I planned to get those. That is, until I read the package and got scared off by their potentially less-meltable-than-semi-sweet nature. So I went with the organic semi-sweet instead. Excited by the "organic" I decided to go as organic as possible. So I did:

organic brown sugar
sugar in the raw
cage-free brown eggs
and, owing to a wheat gluten semi-intolerance, oat flour instead of all-purpose (I mean, they're oatmeal cookies, right? Why not go full-throttle, I figured. You know, really oat it up.)

Who needs rules, people? Who needs recipes? My cookies were going to be great. So I get home with all of my ostensibly socially-responsible groceries and set to work.

And then I realized I didn't have enough butter. Now the grocery store is all the way across the street from me. It was a cold day--mid-60s--windy and gray. Going all the way back to the store was clearly out of the question. Being ingenious, I decided to augment with oil. I was only about a tablespoon short of butter, so what's a little oil to help go the distance? I turned to my oil options and grabbed the Safflower. I noticed the bottle had, at best, about a 1/2 teaspoon in it. That would not do. So, I went with the other option: Olive.

Yep, olive oil. In cookies.

Cookies that flattened so much through baking that they all baked together, showing very very little pan underneath. It was one huge cookie STUCK to the pan (hint: do not believe the directions when they instruct you to not grease the pan).

While chiseling the first batch off of the pan (and oh there was so much dough still in the bowl for more batches), I was able to eat a bit of extremely crunchy "cookie."

The verdict?

Well, 'substantial' comes to mind. Not light and airy, these. A second term came to mind as I continued chewing (read: crunching): 'fried-like.' Yep, how one can bake something that's meant to be a dessert that comes out tasting more like a chocolate-infused fried entree is beyond me. Or, apparently, not at all beyond me.

It wasn't all for naught: after eating one of the more intact cookies just before yoga, I was stuffed.

Hmm, think I could pass these off as some new energy bar?