Monster Cookies

 

Today is Friday.

Liz doesn’t cook on Fridays. However, it has become my favorite day to bake. I love nothing more than being alone, in a sunny kitchen, with some music playing or maybe a baking show on TV and baking the afternoon away. It also comes in handy to have sweets on hand over the weekend, when we stop caring about being healthy and make up for all the calories that we denied ourselves during the week. I’m also ready with treats if we hang out with friends or family.

To that end, we were invited over to some friends’ house for pizza tonight. When I asked what dessert I could bring I got a very specific answer of “chocolate chip cookies”. Hey now, I can do better than that for the first time I hang out with people! I just couldn’t bring myself to make such a plain treat. They must not know I am a professional blogger (ha). I decided to make “monster cookies” which are basically ramped up chocolate chip cookies. Or maybe indecisive cookies. They usually have peanut butter, M&M’s, chocolate chips and oatmeal.

I got this recipe from a former co-worker and had never made it before. BIG no-no when serving to other people, but this rule was trumped by the fact that I had a container of Hoody’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Mix left over from Thanksgiving and I wanted out of my line of sight in the pantry. The recipe calls for 4 oz each of chocolate chips, M&M’s, and peanuts and go figure this Hoody’s mix of chocolate chips, M&M’s, peanuts (and peanut butter chips, mini peanut butter cups and peanut butter pretzels) had almost exactly that much left in it! When things are that serendipitous in the kitchen, I have to go with it. I picked out the pretzels and weighed what I had. It was only 4oz over the 12oz the recipe called for. I mixed in the exact 12oz and didn’t think it looked like too terribly much so I added in all I had for an even pound of mix-ins. You can’t always go over what the recipe calls for. Sometimes if there are too many added mix-ins the cookie just falls apart without enough dough to bind everything together. This one happened to work out.                                     


Monster Cookies

Yield: 100 cookies 100! I love recipes like this. I had enough for entertaining the next night and the whole following week. It would be great for a bake sale, except for the nuts.

*This recipe is gluten free if you use gluten free oatmeal – check your mix-in packaging to confirm. 

Ingredients

3 eggs

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

1 stick unsalted butter

1 T. vanilla

2 tsp. baking soda

1 ½ cups peanut butter

4 ½ cups oatmeal

¼ lb. peanuts, coarsely chopped

¼ lb. M&M’s

¼ lb. chocolate chips

Optional mix-ins: peanut butter chips, mini peanut butter cups, Reese’s Pieces, etc. (up to 1 lb. total)

Kitchen serendipity

 Instructions

     1) Preheat oven to 350°F.

     2) Beat eggs and add sugars, butter, vanilla, baking soda and peanut butter. Cream together.

     3) Add oatmeal and up to one pound of mix-ins.

     4) Drop by teaspoons onto un-greased cookie sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes. OR drop by tablespoons, flatten with bottom of a glass and bake 12 minutes. I went this route and got about 60 cookies.

"Luca, smile for Mommy's blog!" Typical. He loved them, I swear.

 

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