My life has changed in so many ways since Kramer, my husband, passed away. When he was here, I made cakes, apple crisps, brownies and bars all the time. It was easy to make a cake for him to pack in his lunch and it lasted all week. The same with other treats made in a pan. Nowadays, if I make something like that, half of it goes to waste unless I send it to Kalissa’s house.
So now, I’m into cookie making. Cookies work so much better for us now. I make a batch and put them in the freezer. Then when I want one, I take one out.
I have some pretty good cookies in my arsenal. My most made are:
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Monster Cookies
Soft Ginger Cookies
Rice Crispies Cookies
Chocolate Cookies
Sugar Cookies
The cookie recipe that I hadn’t found the perfect recipe for was Oatmeal Raisin.
Well…after trying this recipe that is no longer true… I found the very best Oatmeal Cookie Recipe HERE.
Silly me, I started making them without reading through the entire recipe….and if I had read it, I likely wouldn’t have made them. First off, I had to put the raisins in boiling water, let them set and then drain them.
I had to put walnuts in a pan and cook them on the stove. I’ve heard of “plumping raisins” but not cooking walnuts…but then the worst. After I mixed up the cookies, I had to refrigerate the dough. Darn. I just hate that. Seriously, when I decide to make cookies I want to make them and be done. I’m in the mood at that moment….not two hours later…not the next day.
Well…I can happily say that I’m so glad I didn’t read the recipe. I’m so glad I jumped through the extra hoops. There cookies are fabulous.
One thing I want to really warn you about…I’d cut the amount of raisins down to 1 cup. I love raisins. Not everyone else does. 1 1/2 cups is a little much. The other thing, before you refrigerate the dough really make sure the raisins are incorporated throughout the cookies. I didn’t and ended up with massive amounts of raisins at the bottom of the bowl.
Karl doesn’t love raisins but he really like the cookies so I’m really excited. The hunt for the perfect Oatmeal Raisin Cookies is over. This is now my go to recipe.
It was totally worth the raisin plumping, walnut cooking and dough chilling. They are that good.
Oatmeal raisin is one of my all-time favorite cookies. I use the recipe on the Quaker Oatmeal container, and have always liked them. I do think the addition of walnuts would be good. I recently did something similar when I made a batch of sugar cookies, not the roll out kind, and it was a new recipe that I didn’t read all through before making them. They had to be refrigerated for an hour, but they too were delicious in the end. So fun to try different recipes!
I always fry any nuts in a little butter before I bake with them. They have much more flavor and stay crispier.
Oatmeal cookies are irresistible to me, I just love their chewy goodness. So I don’t make them often, but I will give these a try when I do!
I love the oatmeal banana cookies with caramel frosting you posted,
I , too, tried a recipe that required boiling the raisins before adding to the dough. They were great! My husband recently brought home some walnuts so he might like them added to the dough. Thanks for the tips!
They look delicious, but where can I find the recipe?
The link is in the blog post. Click where it says HERE.