I make a lot, a lot of cookies, and I really get tired of the same old thing over and over
again.
So no matter how often my kids ask for chocolate chip, I like to play around with other flavors.
And one night I threw these together just on a hunch that they might be okay, and my
next door neighbor ended up naming me "Saint Epic, the Patron Saint of Awesome" over these
cookies.
This is a cranberry and oatmeal cookie dressed with a little bit of coconut.
And the really cool thing about it is it's really easy.
We're going to start over here, and we've got a cup of butter, a cup of brown sugar,
and a cup of regular white sugar in our mixing bowl.
We're going to turn this on.
Ready?
Oh, not too bad.
Now with a lot of cookie recipes and a lot of baking, you have to let something cream
for quite some time.
You don't have to do that with this one.
You really just have to wait until they kind of come together.
Now one thing that you've got to remember, when you're baking.
. .You see how we've got a lot of stuff left on the sides of our bowl?
Stop and scrape that down.
You want it in your cookie.
You don't want it in your dishwasher later.
Okay.
Here we go.
And they're coming.
. .Oh, that's beautiful.
Perfect.
Next step.
And the thing about this cookie, which a lot of cookies you have to do two bowls and combine
the dry and then the wet.
I don't mess with it.
Put one egg in now, and let it start to come together.
And that's just about the only liquid that we're going to use in this batter.
Dough.
It's a cookie dough.
Second egg.
Perfect.
Now I go ahead, and I'm putting a teaspoon of salt.
Now instead of kosher salt, which I use kosher salt for most things, in this case I'm using
plain old table salt.
It's got a finer grain to it, so it dissolves a little more easily and a teaspoon of baking
soda.
We're going to give our cookies a little bit of lift.
And believe it or not, we're almost done.
I'm going to turn that off because I tend to go [explosion sound] when I add the flour
to the mixer.
Turn that back on.
And we're going to let that go for a little bit.
Now as with everything we're doing, you can go on the website and find the recipe.
You can cook along with me if you want to.
And I'd like to say go see my friends over at Modern Supply.
They've got showrooms in Johnson City and in Knoxville.
And they can really make your kitchen fabulous.
Almost done.
I let my little ones do this.
And I mean even my little, little ones do this.
Final thing.
What we have here, two cups of coconut, and we've got dried cranberries, and we've got
three cups of oats.
These are quick-cooking oats.
You don't have to get the instant ones.
I mean, I've never tried them.
I tend not to buy them.
I don't like the texture.
Well, I was going to say everything's in the bowl, except for what I've just dumped on
my foot.
So now it's in the bowl.
And turn it on.
And leave kind of.
. .I better set my mixer.
The dough is nice and heavy.
It's not very wet at all.
So you might want to really think about going with a stand mixer on this one, unless you've
got big guns, and then you can do it by hand if you want to.
That is all there is to this one.
Now, look.
I love that.
See pretty, pretty.
I've got my oven set to 375 degrees, and we're going to use my little disher here.
And I love this thing.
It makes all of your cookies exactly the same size so they cook at exactly the same time.
And you don't have to worry about whether or not you've got some under cooked or overcooked.
Now if I wanted to be all fancy with this, I might take those and roll them like a little
meatball.
But I'm not because I don't want to.
So once I get these on the cookie sheet, I'm going to pop them in my oven, and they're
going to get about 14 minutes.
Now I will say this.
When you're baking, one thing that you really want to consider is if you've never had your
oven calibrated, that is one of the number one problems people run into is that they're
cooking times aren't right.
So if they're trying to follow a recipe, theirs doesn't come out for the right times or the
right temperatures or whatever.
Go to the discount store.
Get a five dollar oven thermometer.
Set your oven to what the thermometer says, because after a few months all ovens go off
true.
So in my oven, I'm going with 375, going for 14 minutes, and these are going to get perfect
and beautiful and golden and awesome.
We have right at 14 minutes in the oven.
And this is what you're looking for.
You want to pull them out just a moment before you think they're going to be done because
if you wait until they're the right color, they'll overcook afterwards.
While they sit on the cookie sheet, they're going to be a little more cooking, and you
actually want that.
That's called carry-over cooking, and it's great if you plan on it.
Now you have to be patient.
They need to sit on the cookie sheet for about five minutes before you transfer them over
to a wire rack to cool.
The reason is if you don't let them rest, they will crumble and fall apart and shred,
and nobody gets a great cookie.
If you are patient, and you get five minutes, then you're rewarded with a warm, gooey thing.
So these I can't touch yet, but these I can.
This is what you end up with.
Soft in the middle, crispy on the edges, and gooey all the way through.