Best Cookies Ever!

I’ll set the scene for you…
It was an icy day, and both Miss Sassy Pants and Aaron had come home early from school/work because the system had closed schools four and a half hours early. With all this extra time on our hands, I suggested we make some scratch chocolate chip cookies. (Miss Sassy Pants has been begging me to do this for quite some time, and we just never really had an extra moment.) Six months pregnant will get you to agree to or suggest things that you normally wouldn’t — like, the addition of some not-exactly-good-for-me sweets.

We were ready to start the recipe, and I handed the cookbook over to Miss Sassy Pants asking her to read the ingredients to me. We’d start with the sugar. She said, “One and a half cups of granulated sugar.” Ok, so we measured it out and creamed it into the butter. Next came the brown sugar. She said, “The same amount — one and a half cups of brown sugar.”

This is where I stopped and realized something wasn’t right. I took the book from her and looked closely. Yup. The recipe called for 1/2 cup of each of the sugars. Oops.

You’d think we could have easily remedied the situation by just tripling the recipe, right? That’s what I would have done if I’d had more butter. I didn’t. We had just enough to make the recipe in our Fannie Farmer cookbook. I was at a loss.

Who do I call when I need help with cooking? My mother-in-law. She always has a solution. (One time, she helped me figure out how to make a cake without eggs.  A. CAKE. WITHOUT. EGGS.)

After much deliberation and discussion of what I did and didn’t have in the cupboard and refrigerator, she took a few minutes to look through her recipes and called me back. We put together this recipe which we can now officially say is OURS. So, I give you the Best Cookies Ever (or what we’re referring to now as GAL cookies (G = Grammy, A = Miss Sassy Pants, L = Lydia). Miss Sassy Pants’s mistake turned in to something wonderful that Iwill be reproducing in the future!

Here is the recipe (and just go with me here):

1 stick butter (softened)

1/4 cup margarine (like, tub margarine)

1/4 cup Crisco (or the like)

1 cup creamy peanut butter

2 eggs

1.5 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar (make this a healthy scoop)

1 cup oats

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup chocolate chips (semi-sweet)

4 squares semi-sweet baking chocolate

2.5 cups flour

1.5 tsp baking soda

Preheat oven to 350.

Cream the butter. Slowly mix in granulated and brown sugar. Add in peanut butter. Add in eggs and vanilla. Stir in oatmeal.

In separate bowl, mix together the flour and the baking soda.

Add flour mixture to sugar mixture.

Chop semi-sweet squares into chunks. Add chunks of chocolate and chips to the mixture.

Use a regular teaspoon to drop batter onto cookie sheets. (I used baking stones because I like them better for cookies and baking.)

Bake at 350 for 15 minutes or until just browned on top.

Allow to cool for 2 minutes or so then move to a cooling rack while you bake the next batch.

This made approximately 3 dozen (depending on how large you make your cookies).

What you’ll notice is that they end up tasting like really stinking good granola bars. They’re very thick and very filling.

(For reference purposes, if these were “regular” chocolate chip cookies, I would be able to swallow 6-8 in one sitting. As Aaron said, with these, 4-6 would be my limit. Seriously, I had trouble with 2 because they were so great!)

I hope you find time to try these out. And SUPER thanks to my mother-in-law (Grammy) for helping me fix the “mistake.” Needless to say, this allowed for a really great math and reading lesson for Miss Sassy Pants. She definitely knows how to read that fraction now.

Have you ever made a mistake that turned into something awesome?