De Baking Psychopath

These cookies have been a long time coming. I must have printed out the recipe months ago. They're a few of my favorite things wrapped up in one cookie: orange, pecans, oatmeal cookies...sounds great, right? I finally got a good opportunity to bake them for a school event last week, and they turned out delicious! Chewy oatmeal cookies with a good orange-flavor punch, crunchy and buttery pecans, and just a touch of creamy white chocolate with every bite. However, the process was less than delightful, and actually made for an interesting self-study in my character flaws. First, I wanted to use up these quick-cooking oats that my mom had left with me when she last visited, instead of the old-fashioned oats I usually use for baking. Despite Alton Brown's prattle about how the more quick-cooking and instant the oats are correlates to how much more broken down and pre-cooked they are echoing in my brain, I thought, ah, how much difference could it make? Despite my outward nonc...

Mmm, Girl Scout Cookies. I don't know about you, but I love Samoas. The cookie base is crumbly-crunchy, the caramel is chewy, the toasted coconut has a wonderful aroma, and the chocolate just rounds everything out. The Oatmeal Cookie Guy made his recipe debut back in February 2008 with this recipe , a Samoa copycat. Gosh, did I have to buy a whole bunch of things for this recipe: caramel sauce, cream of coconut, coconut extract, Rollos...and it's a messy process, with the dough full of toasted bits of things but at the same time wet, so it tends to stick to one's hands rather than itself. My advice in making this cookie is to wash your hands every once in awhile, keeping your hands wet makes the dough easier to roll into balls. But oh, the result! These cookies don't taste exactly like Samoas-- some said they were better.... The cookie is extremely chewy from the 4 cups of toasted oatmeal and 2 1/2 cups of toasted coconut in the batter, and the Rollo candy in the ...

I have recently discovered a food blog that has quickly become one of my favorite blogs of all time: Oatmeal CookieBlog . Oatmeal Cookie Guy (I believe his real name is Greg) lives in New York City and has created dozens of creative, delectable oatmeal cookie recipes, and this one actually won him a local food contest award. Judging by the feedback from his reviewers, there's not a recipe on his site that isn't worth trying... But let's start with the award-winning one. This and the CI "Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie" (see next post) was made tonight in preparation for my program's monthly seminar. Due to the tightening of purse strings lately, the standard free dinner to go with evening events has been indefinitely suspended. So I started making cookies to tide people over until they can get home to dinner. Since I followed the recipe verbatim except for baking time, here is the link to the original recipe on Oatmeal Cookie Blog. My dough came out very wet...