Triple Chocolate Oat Cookies (Chocoloaties)

I love oatmeal raisin cookies, but sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay to tell raisins & cinnamon I’d like to be alone right now—alone with a big pile of oats adorned with three types of chocolate, plus browned butter, whole wheat, and an extra pinch of salt. These are the cookie of my dreams—sweet and chocolatey enough to satisfy the deepest of chocolate needs, and hearty enough to power a long stretch of activities without an abrupt bonk later. The recipe is a mashup of two of my all-time favorite cookie recipes, the $250 Neiman Marcus cookie that I learned how to make in high school, with blitzed oats and double chocolate, and a more recent favorite oatmeal cookie recipe with browned butter, from America’s Test Kitchen, plus some research and additions of my own. Most of the ingredients are straightforward, except the wild card addition of milk chocolate, but don’t let a lack of milk chocolate stop you from making these. I happen to often have milk chocolate chips on hand (Ghirardelli, hidden in the back of the highest cupboard, highly recommend), but I realize most normal people might not. Really any milk chocolate will do—like leftover halloween candy—of course using extra chocolate chips in place of the milk chocolate works great too. I will continue tweaking the recipe of course, and post updates, but for now I’ll leave it here in case, like me, you’ve been hankering for a big batch of cookies that hits the most urgent of brownie cravings while also being acceptable for breakfast. The cookies for breakfast part is a personal opinion, not a fact, which is an important distinction that unfortunately not everyone is willing to make these days.

So, to recap: delicious cookies! You can eat them for breakfast! And please don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

INGREDIENTS

—1 cup (2 sticks) butter

—1 cup brown sugar, packed

—1 cup granulated sugar, packed

—2 eggs

—2 tsp vanilla

—2 1/2 cups rolled oats (not quick cooking)

—1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (or substitute all purpose)

—1/2 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder

—1 tsp baking powder

—1 tsp baking soda

—1 1/2 tsp Diamond kosher salt (use 1/2 tsp table salt if you don’t have kosher, or 1 tsp if your kosher salt is saltier than Diamond)

—1/2 cup milk chocolate chips or 4 oz milk chocolate (bar or pieces), or substitute any semi-sweet chocolate chips or bar

—2 cups (12 oz) semi-sweet or dark chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Melt butter in a shallow pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally at first and then nearly constantly after a few minutes as the foaming and crackling subsides. Once it starts smelling more nutty, stir constantly until you detect a slight change in color to golden, then scrape it all into a large mixing bowl. (A note on browning butter: It’s taken me a while to get this skill down. I don’t like to get it too browned, since I’m kind of a wimp, but if you like to live on the edge you can keep stirring until the milk solids start to turn light brown. Your flavor will be maximized but the risk of burning it all and having to start over (and wasting all the butter) definitely increases the more you brown the butter, so I like to stop just as it turns golden. You do you!)

In a food processor or high powered blender, process the oats into a coarse flour, with 8 1-second pulses. Add the 1/2 cup of milk chocolate (or 1/2 cup extra chocolate chips) and pulse for another 6-8 good pulses to break the chocolate up into bits.

In a large bowl, whisk the whole wheat flour, cocoa powder, oat and chocolate mixture, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together until evenly blended and no lumps remain.

Add the sugars to the melted butter, followed by the vanilla and then the eggs, mixing or whisking by hand until smooth and slightly lighter tan in color. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, mixing well and scraping the sides and bottom until only a bit of dry mixture remains. Add the chocolate chips and continue to mix until no flour pockets or dry ingredients remain. The dough will be thick and slightly crumbly; use your muscles and keep mixing.

Shape dough into balls by heaping, rounded tablespoons, and place each ball 2 inches apart on a baking sheet (I use thick, insulated baking sheets for evenly browned, not burnt, bottoms). Use your palm to press each ball gently into a thick disk, and bake for 8-10 minutes in the preheated 375 degree oven, rotating the sheet back to front near the end of baking time, until the dough looks dry. Rest the cookies on the sheet for 2-3 minutes and then transfer them to a baking rack to cool further.

You know you want one.