Good Cookies

My friend Angela needed cookies donated for a school bake sale, so I volunteered to make some. I felt like making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. A chef I know had recently recommended the Smitten Kitchen site to me, so I did a search on the site and found Oatmeal, Chocolate Chip and Pecan Cookies.

Yum! This is an almost-perfect oatmeal cookie, both crispy and chewy. I loaded them up with a little too much sweet, using both chocolate chips and currants, and I had to skip the pecans, because I didn't have them on hand and didn't feel like another trip to the store. I would recommend ditching the currants, definitely using either pecans, or possibly walnuts, to counteract the sweetness, and if you do decide to use the orange zest, halve that quantity. I made a double recipe with half the orange zest. It added a nice fragrant lift, but wasn't overwhelming.(These would be AWESOME with chocolate chips, coconut AND nuts...)

Because I had to make a lot of them, I made logs of the dough the first night and rolled it in parchment. Then I cut and baked the cookies the second night. It made fairly easy work of the sticky dough to slice it with a sharp knife, but I found that I liked the chewiness and thickness of the cookies better when I rolled each slice into a ball before baking, thus back into the stickiness.

I always find it makes things less sweaty and hectic, and that I'm less likely to burn the last batch, if I make the dough one night and bake it the next. These cookies, especially as I made them, are intense, so make sure you have an ice-cold glass of milk or soymilk handy.