Way back August of 2010, my friends and I went to Sagada. It’s a very beautiful and peaceful place. We went hiking and spelunking. Yes, spelunking. We get through from one cave and exited to the other cave. It took us 4 hours inside the tunnel. That’s one hell of an experience. Aside from these activities, Sagada can also boast their great foods. We had breakfast and lunch cooked with fresh ingredients and buffet dinner cooked by an Italian chef.
Don’t get me wrong. This post is not about Sagada, but one thing that Sagada introduced me to, was their crispy oatmeal cookies. The cookies are small in size but believe me it’s something to die for. Its small, sweet and crispy that once you take a bite you can’t stop eating it until you’ll realize that you already consume the whole jar.
When we went back to Manila, the first thing I did was to researched a recipe for crispy oatmeal cookies and found Joy of Baking’s recipe of Crispy Oatmeal Cookies. I tried it and after several tweaking, I made this recipe that suits my taste. Instead of doing the bigger cookies, I made it small, about a teaspoon instead of the 1/4 cup. My mom loves it and frequently bugging me to bake it again. Funny, I gave a tub of these cookies (about 30 pieces per tub) to a guy friend and he fell in love with the cookies that he selfishly share a piece of this cookie to he’s neighbor’s son and told him that he could only get one piece. Oh, I made some money by selling this during the Christmas of 2010. This time, I also tried baking the 1/4 cup version cookie of this recipe.
Ingredients
260 grams Flour
150 grams Old Fashioned Rolled Oats
2 teaspoons Cinnamon
1 teaspoon Baking Soda
1/4 teaspoon Salt
226 grams Butter
160 grams Brown Sugar
160 grams White Sugar
1 teaspoon Vanilla
2 pieces Eggs
90 grams Rice Krispies or Rice Cereals
250 grams Chocolate Chips or Chopped Chocolates of your choice
Procedure
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Mix together flour, oatmeal, cinnamon, baking soda and salt.
2. Soften butter to room temperature. (I roughly chopped the frozen butter to easily soften the butter.)
3. Beat soften butter, brown sugar and white sugar until creamy.
4. Add vanilla and beat until well incorporated.
5. Add the eggs and beat. (Just a tip. Do not directly crack the egg on your batter. Crack it on a bowl before adding to the batter. This will prevent the eggs destroying the recipe if it happened that the eggs are already rotten.)
6. Slowly add the dry ingredients, about 1/4 cupful at a time and mix at low speed. (we don’t want the flour go allover our face.)
7. Fold in rice crispies. (At this part, the dough will be tough. You may want to shift to wooden spoon if you’re using hand mixer.
8. Fold in chocolate chips until equally distributed into the batter. Let the batter relax in fridge for an hour before baking.
9. Scoop about a teaspoon of the batter and place on the cookie sheet lined with parchment paper 2 inches apart from each other. Bake for 7 to 8 minutes or until the edges of the cookies turned golden brown. Bring out from the oven and place on a cooling rack for 5 minutes before transferring on a cooling rack. (The bottom of the first batch of cookies got burned so I doubled the parchment paper and it works fine.)
10. If doing the bigger cookies, scoop about 1/4 cup or use an ice cream scoop and place in the cookie sheet lined with parchment paper 4 inches apart from each other. Slightly pressed to flatten the top of the batter and bake for 10 minutes. The edges of the cookies should be golden brown but the center should still be slightly under cooked. Remove from the oven and place the cookie sheet on top of a cooling rack for 5 minutes before transferring to another cooling rack to cool completely.
HOW DOES IT TASTE?
The cookies are very cinnamon in flavor, which how I like my oatmeal cookies. As you bite on the mini oatmeal cookie you’ll hear that cracking sound from the crispy edges of the cookie and as you chew on it, you’ll feel its chewiness coming from the rolled oats and that lovely crispy feeling coming from the rice krispies. On the other hand, the big oatmeal cookies chewy and soft but you’ll be surprise that the rice krispies actually imparts texture and a new sensation while eating your oatmeal cookies.
Between the two, I prefer the mini oatmeal cookies because its so handy as if you’re just eating chips. If you’re going to watch a movie and you have this on your hand, It’s as if you’re eating pop corn and not long enough, before you notice it, you’re out of cookies.
