A great cookie recipe!

Hello to all,

Wow, September was a gorgeous month here in Ontario. It was the weather I was actually hoping for in July and August- temperatures were in the mid 20s, and there was very little humidity. I was able to swim at our local beach almost every day. Hallelujah!

Last weekend was our area’s local studio tour. I love it every year and this year was no exception. A wonderful surprise was finding a new cookie recipe to try. One of the artists not only had interesting, beautiful, sometimes quirky things to show, he also put out a plate of his homemade cookies, and was willing to share the recipe with me. I have tried it three times this week, and each variation was really good. You start with a bag of Quaker cookie mix- the oatmeal variety. If you use a whole bag at once, enough to make 4 dozen cookies, then you can add any combination of 1 cup of unsweetened coconut, 1 cup of dried cranberries, 1 cup of raisins and 1 cup of chocolate chips. The key ingredient is to also add the zest of one orange. If you don’t have a zester, you can use your normal grater, if it has a fine setting on it.

I tried the recipe the first time, just adding dried cranberries, as that was all I had in the house that day. It made good cookies. But the next time, I added coconut, cranberry, chocolate chips + the zest of an orange. My partner’s assessment was that these were his favourite of any kind of cookie I have ever made. Wow!

Right now the timer is going off and it’s time for me to get a batch of cookies out of the oven again. This time, I also added raisins, and we’ll see if that improves them even further!

A couple of tips- Wait for the cookies to fully cool before you try one. They are better cooled, and even better if you put them in the freezer, and eat them the next day after they have thawed. The recipe on the bag of oatmeal cookie mix tells you to bake them for 10-12 minutes for chewy and 12-14 minutes for crispy. Trial and error says that for my oven, 12 minutes is the sweet spot!

If you feel inclined to try them, happy baking! They sure make the kitchen, and the whole house, smell great!

PS This just in from my in-house taste tester: “ Leave out the raisins next time, I liked the last batch better!”