Since I keep teasing people with pictures and exclamations of how good these cookies are, I figured I should at least share the recipe.  With the amount of butter it contains, they are not “healthy”, but between the whole wheat flour and the Scottish oatmeal, you’ll get your fiber!  The whey replaces white sugar, and per the leaflet from Tillamook, whey is supposed to bring “tenderness” to cookies.

These are especially good with milk.  (Or soy milk, as the case may be.)

Ingredients
 1  cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
1  cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup Tillamook whey powder (I don’t know where you can buy this outside of the gift shop)
2  eggs
1  teaspoon vanilla (Use the pure vanilla – none of that artificial nonsense)
1-1/2  cups wheat flour (Bob’s Red Mill!)
1  teaspoon baking soda
2  teaspoons Vietnamese cinnamon (The type of cinnamon you use makes a big difference.  Costco has it for a really good price.)
3  cups uncooked Scottish Oatmeal (Again, Bob’s Red Mill!)
At least one teaspoon zest from a Clementine mandarin orange.  I think more is better.

Prep
Heat oven to 350°F. In small bowl, blend together flour, baking soda, and cinnamon. In large bowl, beat butter, brown sugar, and whey powder with an electric mixer until creamy. Beat in eggs and vanilla until mixture is even creamier. Gradually add flour mixture; mix well with a wooden spoon. Add oats and orange zest; mix well.

Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until light golden brown. Use metal spatula to move cookies to wire rack for cooling. Once cooled completely, serve or store.

I froze some of the dough to use for baking later, and hopefully that will work out well.

Oatmeal Orange cookies

Originally uploaded by illusionary_one

Bought a package of whey at the Tillamook Cheese Factory the other weekend to try baking with it. The first batch was hazelnut spice, which were pretty good, even though I had to sub out a few ingredients since I didn’t want to go back to the store.

This batch is in the oven, and it uses whole wheat flour, scottish oatmeal, and whey as the "exotic" ingredients. Hopefully they will turn out well.

(We have a dozen eggs that are the end of their shelf life, so I am baking and cooking a lot this weekend.)

This was so simple it was almost criminal.  A buddy of mine picked up a 50 lb bag of coconut flour from Bob’s Red Mill (don’t ask why) and distributed samples for us to play with. I took the oatmeal cookie recipe off of the Quaker Oats box, but substituted coconut flour for the traditional flour.  I figured out later that I should have added an additional egg or two to balance it out, but the cookies still stayed together pretty well.

Aaron decided that “fried ice cream” flavor ice cream would go really well with oatmeal cookies, so that is what I used.  I used a large spoon to squish ice cream into my silicone muffin pan.  I filled them all the way up, but next time I would only fill them half way. You could probably do this with a regular muffin tin, but the silicone makes it really easy to release the ice cream from the mold.  The muffin pan went into the freezer while I prepped and baked the cookies.

I used a circular cookie cutter to make the cookies match the same size as the muffin pan reservoirs. Cookies were a little crumbly because I didn’t use enough egg, but oh, were they tasty!!!!  I think it is better to assemble the pieces while the cookies are a little bit warm because that helps the ice cream to stick to the cookies.

My inner domestic goddess kicked in this weekend, and I got the urge to bake cookies. The domestic goddess in me loves to bake, be crafty, and generally make messes, but I’ve had less luck getting her to tackle projects like organizing the hall closet, alphabetizing the spice rack, or scrubbing floors. Such is life.

These are the wicked cookies I made this evening… I thought the green would be fun for halloween* since I didn’t see any orange chips at the store.

* No, these cookies won’t last until Halloween. Since I’m taking some into work tomorrow, I’ll be surprised if they last until Tuesday.

Minty Malty Cookies
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1 cup flour
1/4 cup malted Ovaltine
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 egg
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup mint chips

Preheat oven to 375 F. Use hand-mixer to combine sugars with butter in a small mixing bowl. Mix in egg and vanilla. In a second bowl, combine flour, Ovaltine, and baking soda. Gradually combine the contents of both bowls until smooth and creamy. Mix in mint chips.

Spoon 1 inch balls onto cookie sheet with a 2 inch distance between each ball of dough. Bake for 8 – 10 minutes or until toasty brown. Pour yourself a glass of milk and enjoy!