Kicked Up Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.

My husband, my better half...who puts up so well with my crazy bouts of baking and resulting floury messes in the kitchen...asked me the other day after arriving home from the Cupcake Bakeoff where I won a few prizes... 'When are you going to start making cookies?'.

Since my hub is not really a man of many requests, he is very easy going, which means mostly we do what I want to do, eat what I want to eat, watch what I want to watch, when he does ask for something, I tend to listen. I said..What kind of cookies do you want? Oatmeal Raisin.



Mental note made. So, since he is leaving for a business trip this weekend, I decided that I would make him some Oatmeal Raisin cookies. I am not sure if he can take them with him or not as he's going to another country, but if not, then we'll be sure and eat them all before he leaves.

The dilemma was where to turn for a plain Oatmeal Raisin cookie. I consulted four of my favorite baking books. None of them just had an Oatmeal Raisin. Chocolate chunk raisin pecan oatmeal yes. Regular Oatmeal Raisin no. Stuck.

Then inspiration struck me. My pal, Amelia, over at Stripey Dots, is smitten with Oatmeal Cookie Guy's website and his cream cheese filled cookies, which we have eaten over at their house...and are amazing. I went right over and lo and behold, he had recently come to the same realization, there is a dearth of regular Oatmeal Raisin recipes out there. So he posted one.



And of course, me being me, I couldln't just LEAVE it as is. I had to make a few tiny changes to it. Which of course I think resulted in something even better than the original might have been but because I didn't try it his way...I might never know. Typical!



In any case, these came out quite exactly how I wanted and expected. Next time maybe I'll put the cream cheese inside! But for now, we went with (mostly) simplicity.

Check out his original 'Better than Grandma's Oatmeal Raisin Cookie' recipe here. The adaptations I made were to soak the raisins in hot rum for about 5 minutes before mixing them in at the end; doubled the cinnamon; added about a 1/2c of white wheat flour to the recipe (in addition to what he calls for), and used about 1/3 less raisins and oatmeal.



They still came out chubby and amazing and packed with oatmeal and raisins...with just a little bit of a spiced up kick to them. Next time I might add pumpkin pie spice instead of just cinnamon!