Oatmeal Cookies Done Two Ways

After having a break in the freezing cold weather, the temperatures have started to drop again. Blowing snow all day today. Watching that snow whip past the window just made me want to snuggle under a blanket, in front of the fire, with a plate of warm cookies and a glass of milk. Sounds good, doesn't it?

With this in mind I baked two huge batches of cookies - Oatmeal Chocolate Chip and Cranberry Oatmeal.

The recipe below produces the most wonderful soft, chewy cookies.

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup chocolate chips/dried cranberries/chopped nuts, etc.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

In one bowl cream the butter and sugar. Stir in the eggs, and then the vanilla. In a separate bowl mix the flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix well. Stir in the rolled oats.

At this point I split the mixture in two and put half into another bowl. Because there is half as much batter, I only added 1/2 cup of chocolate chips to one, and 1/2 cup of dried cranberries to the other.

I wanted to make little bite-sized cookies, so I used a 1 teaspoon measuring spoon to scoop the batter and drop it onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 12 minutes or until the cookies are just slightly brown. This is how you get chewy cookies - take them out of the oven before they're done. They'll continue cooking as they cool on the cookie sheet.

After a few minutes I moved the cookies to my awesome new cooling racks - a Christmas gift from my in-laws. Isn't it great that they're stackable?

This recipe made about 10 dozen mini cookies - about 3 to 4 dozen if you're making regular-sized ones.

And then we spent the rest of the afternoon getting cozy and eating way too many cookies.