HEY!
Quite a few years ago, when I was just a wee home baker indiscriminately ploughing my way through the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook (yikes), I came across a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies in Gwyneth Paltrow’s Notes From My Kitchen Table. It had a lot of ingredients that I didn’t recognise at the time (brown rice syrup! walnut flour! two types of spelt flour!), and it just seemed kind of overwrought for the sake of it, so I cobbled together an alternative recipe; they were so successful I was baking them every week.
After a very long period of not baking them, my mum asked me to make them again. The recipe I wrote at the time… leaves something to be desired. So I tested them, and retested them, and used scales this time, and I think it’s a very good cookie recipe indeed. The ground almonds and oats make for a lovely soft, moist texture, and there is plenty of mix-ins, such as choc chips or nuts, to be had (unlike the original - Gwyneth is stingy!). And! Not only does the honey make these cookies refined sugar free, it also imbues them with a really fragrant sweetness.
Like with pretty much any recipe I write, you can customise and change what you fill the cookies with almost infinitely. You’ve got 175g to play with, so here are some ideas:
cranberries & pistachios (the original combo!)
chocolate chips & toasted coconut flakes
candied peel & toasted almonds
dates & pecans
Whatever you decide to go with, I would suggest lightly toasting nuts and seeds in the oven, and soaking dried fruit in hot water before adding them to the mix.
Soft Oat & Honey Cookies with Cranberries & Pistachios
120g porridge oats
120g plain flour
90g ground almonds
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
140g honey
50g neutral vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
60g water
100g dried cranberries
75g pistachios
Preheat the oven to 180c/160c fan/GM 4. Line two baking sheets
In a small bowl, cover the cranberries with boiling water and set aside. Put the pistachios on a baking sheet and toast lightly until fragrant, approx. 5-10min. Once they are cool enough to handle, roughly chop.
In a large mixing bowl, combine oats, flour, almonds, bicarb, cinnamon and salt. Mix thoroughly.
In a separate bowl, combine honey, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract. Pour into the dry ingredients, and mix (using a spoon or your hand) well to form a dough.
Drain the cranberries, then add them and the pistachios to the dough and mix.
At this point, the dough should be quite crumbly and the mix-ins will be falling out - add the water, wait a few seconds, then mix thoroughly. Now it should resemble a conventional cookie dough!
Roll out into 40g balls and place on the baking sheet, making sure they are nicely spaced apart.
Lightly press down on each cookie, just to flatten into a thick puck. Move to the oven and bake for 10-12min, until golden on the outside and soft on the inside.
Leave to cool on a wire rack (or eat immediately, while they still have that delicious, near molten texture). Keep in an airtight container for up to a week; they will soften as the days go by - delish.
I’m wondering if you could use coconut oil in these instead; provided you want that coconut aroma throughout the cookie, I don’t see why not. Substituting the honey for maple syrup or similar might give you a different texture, so play around with the proportions.
I also thought you could maybe make little balls of peanut butter, freeze them, and then wrap the cookie dough around them? To make some sort of peanut butter core cookie?? Doesn’t that sound nice???
I’m going back to full time at the restaurant next week, so god only knows what will be hitting your inboxes next weekend after a week of dinner service. Can’t wait!!
Mia