The thing about baking is that when you try a new recipe, it's always a gamble. Baking is a science; there isn't a lot of wiggle room for ingredients and measurements and so on. Not to mention there are so many versions of recipes for the same thing that is usually takes at least a few tries for me to find the recipe for standards (things I will bake a lot, like a simple white cake).
What I'm getting at here is that this isn't the best oatmeal cookie recipe I've ever used. I just did a google search, and picked the top one. The problems I had with it are as follows:
1. There seemed to be a lot of dry ingredients (2 cups of flour and 3 cups of oats) for the amount of wet (1 cup butter and 2 eggs). It was extremely hard even for my Kitchen Aid to mix the very very thick batter, and even after underbaking them, they turned out a bit dry. Considering these were advertised as soft cookies, that's kind of lame.
2. It asks you to chill the batter for at least an hour before baking. I couldn't think of a reason that this would be necessary for simple oatmeal cookies, (so I just didn't do it). To double check I googled the possible reasons why you might have to chill cookie dough, and the top reasons were to make them less sticky (not a problem with the dry batter) and to let the flavours rest and meld. Well I'm not that fancy. I think that in this recipe the chilling may be so that the cookies cook less in the same amount of time, and are therefore soft, but there are plenty of recipes out there that combined with a slight under bake can produce soft cookies, which is WAY easier.
3. It asks you to roll the batter into balls to bake. They did not flatten out while baking, so they turned into little oatmeal domes. Didn't look at all like the photo, or like homey, yummy cookies. My second batch I ended up just dropping rather than rolling, but the batter is so stiff, I actually had to shape them to look rustic, instead of looking like the shape of the spoon.
Some things I liked about the recipe:
1. The ingredients were in very simple quantities. 1 cup here, 2 cups there, 1 tsp, 3 cups, etc. Not that it's terribly complicated to measure out 1 1/3 cups of something, or 3/4 tsp of something else, but it's just nice to only dirty 1 measuring cup and 1 measuring spoon.
2. The peanut butter chips work well, though I nearly pulled a muscle trying to mix them in. Even though they are crispy-er than my preferred cookie, they did taste yummy.
Well, if I were to turn that into a pro-con list, it's obvious that I should move back to the drawing board for an oatmeal cookie recipe. There is one I used to make all the time when I was young, I wonder if my mom still has it..
And here is the recipe:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/soft-oatmeal-cookies/Detail.aspx
