The fact that I have a sweet tooth is no secret, it should probably be called an unhealthy obsession. Generally, I keep it in control by not buying sweets and not baking them unless I am bringing them to someone else. It’s a good plan, most of the time. But every now and then, I cave. Lately, when that has happened, Darry and I have gone out for ice cream. With the extreme heat we have had lately, how could you blame us? In the evening, as the sun goes down, we like to go to the Village and visit the local ice cream shop and then walk around.

But this week, I felt like having cookies. Oatmeal cookies, with raisins. The kind that stay a little on the soft side and would probably make great ice cream sandwiches, but I will not be trying that anytime soon…feel free to do it though, and report back to me if you do.

Over the years, I have made oatmeal cookies with any number of added goodies. Dried currants are my favorite choice but dried peaches and figs are really good too. This batch has raisins, dark raisins but when I use raisins, I usually prefer the golden ones. My husband likes them with dried cranberries. While I love nuts, I hardly ever add them and more often than not, I see them with chocolate chips but even though I am a huge chocolate fan, I cannot stand oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips in them.

My pantry is a little over stocked and I made the choice of dark raisins; all part of the effort to clean out the pantry. Helpful hint, if your fruit is dried out and leathery, don’t toss it out! Put it in a pot, cover with water, place over medium heat and let the raisins get hot, just about boiling. Remove them from the heat and let the fruit cool completely. Dump the raisins into a mesh strainer and press gently to remove the excess water. Then add them to the dough. Once baked, the raisins will be nice and soft and will also add a little moisture to the dough but too much moisture can lengthen the baking time.

One of the nice things about oatmeal cookies, it is easy to hide whole grains in them. Besides using whole grain rolled oats, you can also use whole wheat flour and trust me, no one will know! The oats can also be swapped out for other whole/rolled grains. Trader Joe’s sells a mixture of rolled whole grain made from a mixture of oats, wheat, barley and rye and that would work in this cookie too!

A few notes to ponder:

Because I do try to make better eating choices, I made the batch of dough, scooped it out using a restaurant style portion scoop and chilled the balls of dough. When it was time to bake them, I only pulled 8 scoops of the dough and froze the rest in a ziplock bag. Now I do not have to worry about eating too many at once! My scoops were 1 ounce a piece and the best size scoop for that is a #40 scoop. What does that mean? Food service portion scoops are somewhat standardized. A #40 scoop will most likely have a purple handle and the number stands for the amount of scoops needed to equal a quart. Look for this scoop in your local restaurant supply shop or online, you will not regret purchasing one because it will help you get a consistent size and make quick work of the scooping.

Recently, I wrote a guest post for fellow Virginia Blogger, Liz of I Heart Vegetables, on the importance of proper measuring in baking. While using a scale is something I have done all of my professional life, it isn’t always the way I do things at home. Until now, this recipe and the majority of recipes to follow will be written using weights. If you like what you see, you will need to use a scale to make it. Before you panic, you can easily find one at the store-even the grocery store, and the majority of them cost less than $20.

Quite a few of the ingredients in this recipe are interchangeable on a 1:1 basis. While I could have used butter, I chose coconut oil because I wanted to add the flavor without adding the texture to the cookies. When I bake, if a recipe calls for molasses, I almost always reach for sorghum instead. It is milder in flavor and a little lighter in color but most importantly, it tastes so much better! Sorghum is a traditional Southern syrup made by cooking down the juices extracted from sorghum canes. It is sweet and turns a deep amber as it cooks which gives it a molasses-like flavor and for that reason, it can be referred to as sorghum molasses. It can be tricky to find in other areas of the country so you may have to purchase it online. Remember when I mentioned using whole wheat flour? Well, sometimes I use only whole wheat, other times, I blend it half and half with all purpose and if I am not paying attention, I am likely to just use the all purpose. Don’t sweat it, use what you like, and if you want to add a little fiber to your diet, use whole wheat, you will still love the cookies!

Oatmeal Cookies with Raisins

makes about 24 (1 ounce) cookies

4 ounces of raisins or your favorite dried fruit

6 ounces unbleached all purpose flour

5 ounces rolled oats

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

4 ounces organic coconut oil

6 ounces granulated sugar

2 tablespoons molasses or sorghum

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

If the raisins are a bit dry, place them in a pot and fill with water to just cover them. Heat the raisins over medium heat until steam begins to rise from the water and small bubbles start to form around the edges. Turn off the heat and set the fruit aside to plump until cooled. Dump the raisins into a mesh strainer and gently press out the extra moisture. Adding a lot of extra water will cause them to spread like crazy and will ruin the texture of the cookie.

Place the flour, oats, baking soda and cinnamon into a small bowl and whisk to combine, set aside for now. In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the coconut oil with the sugar, molasses, vanilla and salt. Begin to cream the mixture, scrape the bowl and allow it to cream for 2-3 minutes. Add the egg, mix it in, scrape the bowl and mix again. Add the flour mixture followed by the raisins. Using a spatula or wooden spoon, mix by hand until it is thoroughly blended.

Using the portion scoop, carefully scoop the dough and place on a pan lined with parchment. Chill completely. Before baking, preheat the oven to 350. Place the desired amount of dough at least two inches apart on parchment lined pans (or silpats) and allow them to sit and soften a bit. Press down on the cookies to form a thick disk (will encourage spreading) or leave them in the shape of the scoop (for thicker cookies). Bake for 6 minutes, turn the pan and rotate top to bottom, and bake for another 6 minutes for soft cookies, 8 for crispy ones. Allow the cookies to cool on the pans for a few minutes then carefully lift them off and place onto a cooling rack to finish setting. Store airtight at room temperature, will stay soft for about 3-4 days after which they will get crispy but will still taste good!

If you chose not to bake all of the dough, place the rest of the chilled scoops into a ziplock bag and freeze for a later day. Allow to thaw before baking, will keep in the freezer for about a month.

For what seems like forever, I have wanted to make my own granola bars. When I had to pack lunches for the girls, I would buy them and occasionally, eat some myself, but a single glance at the ingredient list alway left me cringing. Over the years, I have experimented with granola bars but most of the results just did not give me the chewy but soft texture I was hoping for. My collection of recipes to try has grown quite a bit and when the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers chose to make the recipe for Granola Energy Bars in Baking Chez Moi, I happily baked along.

The recipe is fairly simple and does not have any tricky steps. Toast, boil, mix and bake. Simple ingredients, easy process, what more could a baker want? The added perk, flexibility as far as what you put in the bars. The only must, rice syrup something that most supermarkets with a natural food section carry these days. My thought was to try different combinations of fruits and nuts to make a variety of bars to snack on. The only thing I did not do was use rolled oats. Trader Joe’s sells a whole grain hot cereal blend that is made of rolled oats, wheat, barley and rye. There is almost always a carton on the shelf in my pantry and I decided to use the blend rather than just oats. Working with half the recipe amounts for each batch, I made one batch with dates, cocoa nibs, and walnuts, one batch with Trader Joes Berry Blend (dried cranberries, cherries, golden raisins and blueberries) with almonds and a third batch with mission figs and almonds. For all of them, I included sweetened coconut and pumpkin seeds, substituted coconut oil for the butter and eliminated the sunflower seeds and the vanilla extract.

The mixture was easy to prepare and the three pans came together quickly. My only wish, that somewhere in the directions it stated how thick they should be in the pan. The dimensions of the pan is slightly uncommon and with my half batches, I was winging it and hoping that my 6″x 6″ were a good choice. Since I have had such a problem with the oven temperatures in other recipes, I set the oven to 300F and it took a long time for them to bake, nearly double the time to get them a nice toasty color on top. This may also have to do with the fact that I did not pretoast my rolled grains; I was hoping to keep them softer.

So what were my results? Really chewy and almost hard bars that despite the different combinations of fruit, all tasted the same. Because I did not want them to taste like vanilla, I left out the extract but now I wonder about whether I should have added something like cinnamon because they had an oily taste that must have come from greasing the pans. In the end, I was a little disappointed with my results but will probably try them again with a full batch of the recipe and a little cinnamon or maybe some pumpkin seed oil and possibly a tiny bit of extract. As for my husband, he couldn’t eat them fast enough and in a couple of days, had devoured at least half of the bars!

To see what the rest of the bakers came up with, visit the Tuesdays with Dorie website and look for the “leave your links” post.