Best cookies...EVER?

Maybe! They were pretty darn good! I wish I took a picture, because they looked liked really good cookies too! These were the Hu La La Surprise cookies with a little tweak.

Luke & I had our very first Hu La La cookie out in Salt Lake City last October from the Lion House. It was unique and good. I looked through the Lion House cookbooks I own and couldn't find the recipe. Typical I thought, if I like something, the restaurant won't give out the recipe (like Barbara Jeans pumpkin bread). Well, they happened to put out a new cookbook soon after, Lion House Bakery, and the recipe was inside! We have made it many many times and it is a favorite of ours, and my mother in law is pretty fond of them too! Well, I decided to make these for our little Mills mini family reunion on Saturday. While I was mixing them up, I thought I would try to make them a little less chunky, so I whirled the oats and coconut, separately, through my vitamix (super powerful blender, though I'm sure a food processor would work or regular blender would do the oats, but watch out with the coconut) before adding to the cookie mix. I love them this way!

Before you make these cookies, be prepared to get your hands messy! These don't call for a mixer and its a lot of dough so I just knead it together with my hands. Oh, and I generally make these into big cookies, a recipe makes a few more than 3 dozen. So, check out the recipe link, and mix these together the next time you need a cookie fix, I don't think you will regret it!

Oatmeal Chocolate Cookies

I made these cookies today. They are pretty good and you can pretend that you are eating healthy (4 cups of oats to 1 cup of flour)! I added chocolate chips to the recipe!

Oh, yeah, I'm done for the day, but be sure to keep going, I went post happy!

Yummy Breakfast

Cookies for breakfast! They were AWESOME! So easy to put together, a little sweet, and pretty good for you!. I based my recipe on this allrecipes.com recipe for pumpkin protein cookies.

Banana Breakfast Cookies

• 1/4 cup honey (I didn’t measure though and it was maybe a little less)
• Heaping 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour (plus extra to bring up to the right consistency)
• 3/4 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 cup mashed banana (I used one large banana and didn’t measure)
• 1 tablespoon canola oil (I used coconut oil)
• 1 egg

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together dry ingredients Stir in wet ingredients (and add extra flour to make it a more cookie consistency, but still fairly wet, you just don’t want it to spread too all over the place in the oven). Drop by ice cream scooper fuls. I made 6 with this recipe.
3. Bake for 10-15 minutes in preheated oven. DO NOT OVERBAKE: the cookies will come out really dry if overbaked.

I fully plan on brining this to the weekly breakfast rotation. So far we have dutch babies, baked oatmeal (though I vary it. less sugar, and may try out a few more recipes), and now breakfast cookies. I can’t wait to try different variations, pumpkin, apple, etc. Oh, yeah, me and two kids, totally ate all six breakfast cookies this morning!

Cookies, cookies, cookies

I've been on a cookie kick. Whenever it is time to make something sweet, I can only see cookies. We love Hu La La cookies so those get made fairly often, they are a chocolate chip cookie full of oats and coconut. But, I've been on the hunt for a really good chocolate chip cookie. Foodgawker.com browsing has not helped my obsession. Apparently lots of other bloggers have been on this search too. I made this one a while back and it was a nice soft cookie, but not as puffy as the photo ( oh, and I didn't add cinnamon). ATK has a recipe, but lately the buzz has been the New York Times chocolate chip cookie. The problem with this cookie, chilling the dough for at least 24 hours. I'm sorry, but when I make up a batch of chocolate chip cookies I have to have a cookie, right then!

So, while browsing on foodgawker.com I found someone who said they mixed some new ATK recipe that called for brown butter with the NY Times cookie. I decided what the heck. Luke was gone this weekend so I whipped up the dough Friday night. Now, I cheated and made up one batch of cookies for me and the kids to eat and put the rest in the fridge like a good baker! Saturday night I pulled out the dough and baked up some more. After being in the fridge the dough was hard though! Also, its hard to tell when these cookies are done since the dough is dark from the brown butter. This batch was not so hot, I overcooked them. Oh, well. I decided to make the rest up Sunday night and these I carefully cooked so that they were not overdone. They were very good. BUT, the first batch right after I mixed up the dough was perfectly good to me too, so I'd probably just do that. Now, I just want to try out the original New York Times recipe (with just plain butter) and then maybe I can move on to some other dessert, or maybe none at all!

This picture is the cookies is from the batch made immediately after mixing. Looking back this look a lot lighter than the chilled dough cookies. These also look like they spread a little more but they were still thick enough for me.

This is what Paul did while I made the dough. Thank goodness for safe non-toys (a milk jug). If I had given him a real toy he would not have been entertained for nearly as long!