Oatmeal Raisin cookie

Crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside, this healthified recipe uses old fashioned rolled oats, raisins and a dash of cinnamon to create the perfect mid-morning snack!

Fight me, but the oatmeal raisin is a mightily underrated cookie. Rich in sweet and salty flavours, buttery and fragrant – what’s not to love about a cookie that can be made from that jar of rolled oats left over from the time you decided to be healthier and cook rolled oats for 10 mins over a stove for breakfast rather than microwave quick cooking oats to increase your daily fiber? As for raisins: they’re the villains creeping up in kheer/payesh (rice pudding) and pulaos, so any recipe that utilizes a mass of them such that they make a positive contribution is clearly a godsend! Vegans across the internet seem to be mashing in bananas and peanut butter with them to make soft “cookies” out of them, but I think this is one time that you need to use (conservative) amounts of butter and sugar to truly transform oats and raisins! Brown sugar and cinnamon pair wonderfully with this combination, while making your kitchen smell divine.

I decided to make these cookies when I discovered a jar of rolled oats that was occupying precious pantry space, but felt no desire for a steaming bowl of it. Don’t get me wrong, oats are great – for your body, if not palate. M for a while rather creatively (desperately?) put oats in her omelette and upma (and happens to be responsible for inducting me to this oats-for-breakfast cult), but that day I felt more like a cookiemonster. There were challenges, of course. These oats had gone soft and smelled like…oats, like toasting them introduces a nice nutty flavour and smell and improves the texture too. Microwaving them for a few seconds works just fine. Necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness (and an acceptance that sometimes things go awry) is the mother of some rather handy baking shortcuts. I used a bunch of black raisins (kala draksh) here, but dried cherries or even golden raisins (kishmish) work too. This cookie is not sweetened much by sugars, so it is the duty of the raisins to create a contrast. And they can deliver! Deceptively, they swell up to juicy grape-like proportions in the oven, even bursting through to the surface of the cookie, but calm down and shrink to their usual size on cooling. ‘Tis a good cookie. This one’s for my oat-loving M.

Be sure to check my troubleshooting guide on baking cookies which was part of my post on chocolate chunk cookies to avoid encountering common problems!

RECIPE

Ingredients:
Oats, 1 cup
All purpose flour or maida, 1/2 cup
Butter, 40g softened
White sugar, powdered 1/3 cup
Brown sugar, powdered 1/3 cup
Egg, 1 whole
Black Raisins, 2/3 cup
Cinnamon, 1/2 tsp
Salt, 1/2 tsp
Vanilla extract, 1 tsp

Method:

Prep: Preheat your oven to 180°C or 350°F. Line your baking sheet with parchment paper or foil.

1. Cream together the butter and sugar for 5 mins (by hand, or 2 mins on a stand mixer) till fluffy/paler in colour.

2. Whisk in the egg.
3. Mix in salt, cinnamon and vanilla extract.
4. Toast the oats either in the oven for 5 minutes or on a pan on the stove or microwave it for 30 seconds. Just make sure that the oats are spread out and not overlapping, so that they get toasted evenly.

4. Fold in the flour and the raisins.
5. Chill the dough for 30 mins – 1 hour in the fridge till it becomes malleable.
6. Shape them lightly into equal sized balls using 1 large spoon or ice cream scoop (the size of motichoor laddoos). Don’t roll them tightly.
7. Bake in the oven for 12 mins till the edges turn brown and the top is golden.
8. Let it cool and harden outside the oven for 20 minutes.

Note: I like to add any flavourings (salt, cinnamon) to the wet mixture so they can be whisked in vigorously, else they may clump up in one part of the batter if added with the flour.

Enjoy!