It's All in the Chips

One of my favorite childhood memories is opening the garage door to my parent’s house after a long day of school and being met with the sweet aroma of cookies baking in the oven. My mother is a great baker. She can whip together a dessert in no time. My love for baking originated in her kitchen. I use to pull up a stool and stand next to her as she whisked together eggs and sugar. I loved when it was my turn to pour in the flour or if I was really lucky, to add in the vanilla. It was not unusual for my stories of playground happenings to be retold over a shared cookie and a glass of cold milk. I loved those days and I still love baking. Freshly baked chocolate chips cookies were a staple in my childhood and now with a kitchen of my own I love testing the limits on what truly makes homemade cookies the perfect dessert.

This past weekend, my younger sister Kathryn came to visit. Somewhere between shopping, sappy girl movies, pedicures, several wonderful meals and one sensational bottle of Chilean wine, baking was involved. Rather than go with a traditional recipes we decided to mix things up a bit with 2 variations of oatmeal cookies. I had on hand, milk chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, peanut butter and cinnamon chips as well as baking M&Ms (for a little color). We knew we wanted peanut butter chips in our cookies, but we were toying with the idea of cinnamon chips as well. 

Logically it did not seem likely that cinnamon and peanut butter would play nicely together in one cookie, but after a few taste tests by Kathryn and the memory of a childhood friend’s favorite snack – peanut butter, cinnamon and banana sandwiches – we had to find out for ourselves. Just in case our experiment did not work out, we split the oatmeal batter in half and made one batch with peanut butter and cinnamon chips and another with peanut butter chips and baking M&Ms. 

Both batches exceeded our expectations. The cookies with M&M’s gave the sense of home that all chocolate cookies require and the cinnamon chips gave an extra kick which played off of the touch of cinnamon in the batter. In fact, Kathryn and I both agreed that the cinnamon and peanut butter cookies outshone the others, especially in combination with the oatmeal. I do not think that we will settle for regular oatmeal cookies ever again. Now the only question is, what flavors should we experiment with next?

Oatmeal Cookie Dough (originated from Allysa Torey’s More from Magnolia):

1 cup all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

1 ½ sticks unsalted butter

¾ cup light brown sugar

½ cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

2 ½ cups oats

Combine the butter and sugars until smooth. Mix in vanilla and egg. Add flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Mix all together then add the oats and 1 cup of peanut butter chips. Cut the dough in half and put one half in a separate bowl. Add ½ cup of cinnamon chips to one batter and ½ cup of M&M’s to the other. Bake cookies at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes. Enjoy! What other cookie flavors have you experimented with?