Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies With Peppermint

Or, Chocolate Chip and Peppermint Oatmeal Cookies

1 c all-purpose flour
3/4 c whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon

1 1/4 c packed brown sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine, room temperature
1/2 c granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp peppermint flavor (Yes, flavor. That's what the bottle I got says. "Flavor" feels a little misleading, though, since the all-of two ingredients are 1. sunflower oil; and 2. peppermint oil. This is basically peppermint oil, people.)

2 1/2 c quick oats
2 c semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375.

Whisk flours, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a small bowl. Beat brown sugar, butter and granulated sugar in a large bowl until creamy. Beat in eggs, vanilla and peppermint. Mix in flour mixture. Mix in oats and chocolate chips. Drop by tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 10 to 13 minutes. Cool on baking sheets, then move to wire racks to cool completely.

***

Okay, here's the story about how this all got started and how it all went down. First of all, I've got cookies on the brain. Next weekend girlfriend is coming into town and roommate is joining us for an all-afternoon, jam-packed Christmas cookie-Athon here at the Dirty Sanchez, our apartment.

But this weekend has been a lonely one for me. Roommate is out of town and I'm getting over the nastiest cold in recent Katherine history. I've spent a lot of time thinking about stuff. With cookies already on the brain at that. I hopped on GChat to catch up with my old friend Jess, no intentions of getting all culinary after just cleaning up from the sushi I made for dinner. Jess happened to mention that she was afoot in her kitchen baking cinnamon peanut butter cookie bars. With absolutely nothing else to do on a Saturday night (except read The Red Tent, but I'm not quite in the mood to overdose on sisterhood tonight), and with cookies on the brain and creativity born out of boredom, I got inspired to dabble in a half-batch of cookies as a precursor to next week's -Athon.

It has to be peppermint, I said. This is the Christmas season, after all.

Oh, and it has to be good.

As usual, Cookthink started putting ingredients against my inspiration. Semi-sweet chocolate chips and peppermint--the combination is fail-proof! But dare I try oatmeal, too?

With Bing Crosby crooning Christmas tunes in the background (thanks, Pandora!), I got to work mangling an existing oatmeal chocolate chip recipe. Flours, soda, salt. Whisk. (I actually didn't think about the cinnamon until later; more on that below.) I don't have a mixer here at the Dirty Sanchez, but I was somewhat (naively) confident that my whisk could successfully apply to the "beat brown sugar and butter" part.

Wrong. Chunks of room-temperature butter wrapped in brown and granulated sugar quickly clogged my tiny wire whisk. I shook them free. No avail. I poked and prodded at them with a knife, scraping residue on the side of the bowl. I then proceeded to pound the mixture with the side of the whisk (not sure what I was trying to accomplish with that one)--same result.

Idiot! I said to myself. You could be using roommate's IMMERSION BLENDER right now, and this would be so much easier!

(Note: I recently discovered the beauty and grace that is the IMMERSION BLENDER. Soups, chopped nuts, yogurt smoothies; I once wondered what it couldn't do. Until tonight.)

Okay, an IMMERSION BLENDER is, like a whisk, NOT A GOOD SUBSTITUTE FOR A MIXER.

I held roommate's IMMERSION BLENDER tight and plunged it into a still-intact chunk of room-temperature butter. The blade made a quick muffled phwahm-phwahm-phwahm sound, and then came clean. But no mixing and churning was happening. In fact, all of the butter was now stuck up inside the blender, packed above the small blade. A little bit of it oozed out the sides, but it was otherwise clear this game was over.

And there was no way to get the butter out from its packed-tight place above the blade except to use my fingers.

By now my hands are covered in the leftovers of a stick of butter and I can't wash them clean. I'm scrubbing and wiping and scrubbing. And my sugar and butter mixture is still, well, not a mixture. I know I can't get through this on Bing Crosby alone. I turn to Mannheim Steamroller. And I turn to my old friend Wooden Spoon who, yet again, bails me out of this greasy confectionery disaster.

Anyway, like I said, I didn't think about the cinnamon until after the first batch of cookies went into the oven. But I think it's a good idea to use it. It keeps the cool breath of the peppermint in check so that it doesn't run away with all of the glory without no guts (the chocolate and oats are super-good!).

And the oatmeal is super-important for texture, chewiness and sugar mitigation. I tried a corner of a cookie that was no-oats and it was a bit too straightforward--high on the sugary, pepperminty flavor train, low on overall interestingness. In other words, the oatmeal gives your pancreas a bit of a break while keeping the act of cookie-eating lively and interesting.



So, I'm a big fan of these cookies. If my camera didn't run out of battery life right after I took the first five pictures, I would post photos of them for you. I could eat them all night. They're so good they make me weep. And you should know that I never weep.

P.S. I should mention that Jess's attempt at the Christmasy pastry failed miserably. Her cinnamon peanut butter cookie bars turned out "the consistency of peanut butter." "I've got a lake of [peanut butter] in my kitchen right now," she said.

P.P.S. I've had three of these cookies already. I definitely like the cinnamon batch better. And, heck, these cookies are even good cold. (But they're really good warm and right-out-of-the-oven gooey.)