Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookie Recipe

The Wet Ingredients:
1 cup margarine (Don't use butter as it will harden the cookie and they dry out quickly)
1 cup of brown sugar - packed
1 cup white granulated sugar
2 well beaten eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

The Dry Ingredients:
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon soda
3 cups oatmeal (regular vs. quick oatmeal will give more chewy texture to the cookie)
1 cup chocolate chips - I use Ghirardelli Semi Sweet morsels

In a mixing bowl, mix the shortening and sugar until smooth. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat until creamy - about 1 minute. In another bowl, mix the flour, salt, soda with a wisk getting the lumps out of the flour. Turn the mixer on low and slowly pour the flour mixture in the wet mixture blending until you have a peanut butter consistency. Continue to add oatmeal and mix either by hand or with mixer. The dough will be very stiff - but keep mixing until all the oatmeal is coated with the dough. Now add the chocolate chips and mix by hand or use your mixer if you think your mixer can handle the stiff dough and chips. Personally, I only use my KitchenAid mixer for this job. I am afraid it might be too much for my hand mixer. If you have a nice KitchenAid mixer, then just use it - it can handle it!

Chill the dough for 2 hours or until less gooey and sticky. Just cover the mixing bowl with clear plastic wrap and stick in the refrigerator. When ready to make cookies, use a cookie scoop like the one featured in the accessories below.

Another thing you can do is pour the room temperature dough onto a large piece of wax paper and form it into a 2 inch diameter log. Wrap it up and place in the refrigerator to chill. When it is time to make cookies, just slice the log in 1/2 inch thickness (as shown in the picture) and place on the cookie sheet, spaced evenly apart and with just enough room to bake without bumping into each other.

Chilling the dough makes the dough easy to handle and will help you make each cookie a consistent size and shape. I have been guilty of skipping this step for the sake of time and convenience. What I end up doing is using a two dinner spoons, scooping one spoon full of dough and using the other to push it off onto the cookie sheet. Honestly, the cookie scoop works much better when the dough is chilled and not so gooey.

Remember the cookies will flatten out quite a bit as they cook.

By now you have your raw cookies on the cookie sheet ready to be placed in a 350 degree oven.

Place only ONE cookie sheet with cookies on the middle rack in the hot oven. Don't try to cook two sheets stacked one on top of the other. The reason why you only bake one cookie pan at a time is so you get even and consistent cooking. Otherwise, if you have two in the oven, the bottom one gets all the direct heat and burns the cookies and the top sheet gets undercooked.

I suppose if you have a convection oven, this would not be a problem. However, I don't, and have to cook them one pan at a time.

Bake for exactly 11 minutes. When cookies are done, they will just begin to brown on the edges and the bottom. The centers will be very soft and may look gooey, but not raw. Remove them from the oven and let them sit to cool - about 10 minutes. This cooling period allows them to finish baking on the pan and become the right consistency to scrap them off the pan. If you cheat and scrap them off the pan too early, they will gob up in a ball and won't look like cookies at all.

By now you have queued your second cookie sheet with raw cookies, so, just pop them in the oven and wait for the others to cool before transferring them to a cooking rack.

Here is a picture of how your cookies should look. The browness is about 1/4 inch in all the way around the cookie.

If you have taken your cookies out of the oven and there is no browning on the edges, then let them stay in the oven a little longer (2-3 minutes) and watch them closely. Pull them out at the first sign of browning and let them finish baking on the pan until the pan cools. Then transfer them to a wire rack. They will continue to harden and form a crunchy crust on the edge but be chewy and delicious in the middle.

If they are too gooey and don't seem done once they cool, then consider baking the next batch just a minute or two longer. If they are too brown and crunchy, consider baking the next batch for exactly 10 minutes instead. If that doesn't help then consider the pan you are using to be the problem.

Have you ever noticed that your cookies don't get brown enough on the bottom and seem cake like? My guess is that you are using a double (insulated) type of baking sheet. My experience has been that these sheets produce disappointing cookies that turn out much like dry cake. So, I vowed to never use them again for cookies. They just don't seem to get hot enough to brown the bottom of a cookie. I think that is actually the feature of these pans - not to burn your stuff. Maybe it is just me, but I have not figured out how to get them to actually brown a cookie bottom. Here is a picture of the cookie sheet I like to use.

Have you ever baked your cookies on a dark non-stick type cookie sheet? These are easy to clean and all, but I found the darkness of the pan gets the cookie too hot and burns the bottom and edges. Nothing worse than a burned brown mess of a cookie. Tossing the whole batch into the garbage can is heart breaking!

These cooking issues may be because of the variation of cookie sheets that you are using. Believe me I have tried them all. The ONLY cookie sheet that I use is a single aluminum sheet that I feature above through Amazon.