Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Chips and Peanut Butter

I have a love/hate relationship with cookies.

I would say that I am more apt to and better at cooking sweets and even though J has the bigger sweet tooth, I enjoy trying new desserts and baked goods. However, cookies are on the bottom of my "love to bake" list.

I know of very few other dishes that are so deceptive. Cookies are a culinary catch-22.  "Bake until the edges are golden brown" is incredibly vague and I usually debate "is the middle raw?" until the golden brown edges indicate a dark brown bottom. And, they're one of the few items that can completely change consistency - for the worse - in a matter of minutes AFTER they're cooked. A golden-brown-edged cookie that is so tender on the pan can be hard as a rock when cooled. So essentially, I should be pulling them out when the centers are raw so that maybe they'll have a chance to be soft later on.

All that ranting aside, we had an almost 24-hour snowstorm yesterday and it may be a relic behavior from our prehistoric days, but severe weather makes me insatiably hungry. I knew I needed to bake.

Seven inches of beautiful snow!

 J'd bought groceries on Monday but didn't include my snowstorm, junk food staples; so I was working on random pantry items. Amazingly, I found a recipe that allowed me to finish off three near-empty baking supplies and made a delicious new treat.

These cookies are fairly simple, but do require some time. Making good brown butter is easy but needs constant attention. I've eaten dishes cooked in/with brown butter and the time and cooking really does add a noticeable flavor difference - it makes for a deeper, nuttier, heightened flavor. As Carla Hall says on The Chew, when cooking, the flavor is in the brown!

I'd never made my own brown butter before and learned a few tricks. For more info visit this article and video tutorial. 

• This should be obvious, but isn't - make your brown butter in a light colored pan. Dark, anodized pans will prevent you from telling if your butter is still yellow, brown, or burnt. Duh!
• Slicing the butter into tablespoon-sized chunks will move the process along faster than dropping in an entire stick.
• Be patient and constantly stir - this can go bad QUICKLY. Stir, stir, stir and keep an eye on the color. Again, this will sound like deceptive cookie talk but when it starts to turn light brown, go ahead and pull it off of the heat or it will black quickly. 

Also, this recipe was originally intended to have a caramel center (the dough "wrapped" around a melting caramel square) but we don't do a lot of caramel in the house and thus didn't have any in the pantry. I thought I could do the same and have a melty ball o' chocolate in the middle, but that is far too time consuming. I would suggest that you can add some mix-ins like nuts or chocolate chips, but stir them in at the end before chilling, this will save a lot of time and effort - and will essentially turn this into a low-maintenance drop cookie.

I love oatmeal cookies because they're so much more hearty. They feel more stout and to me, more homey. They feel more like something my grandma would give me than a super sugary, no-filler cookie. This recipe is for a well-balanced cookie. All of the components blend so well together to create a cookie that isn't over-the-top in sweetness, nuttiness, chocolate or texture - to me, they're just right. They are just sweet enough- by mixing brown and white sugars they have a depth of sweetness from the molasses that just makes you all warm inside (as opposed to sugar high). And the dollop of peanut butter on top adds a great richness that again, isn't over-powering, but compliments the sweetness well. Cooked peanut butter doesn't give the same flavor as you might get from other chocolate-peanut butter recipes that's overpowering. It actually gets deeper and more rich and looses some of it's sugar, this is a much more refined faux-Reeses pairing.

Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Chips and Peanut Butter

Ingredients:
1 stick butter, cut into T chunks (see above on brown butter)
1/2 c white sugar
1/2 c packed brown sugar (dark or light, your choice)
1 large egg
1 t vanilla extract
1 1/4 c all-purpose flour
3/4 c old fashioned oats
1/4 t salt
1/2 t baking powder
1/2-1 c chocolate chips (or other "mix-ins")
peanut butter

Method:

Preheat oven to 350.

In a small sauce pan, melt butter on medium/low heat to create brown butter. Follow directions in tutorial above. Remove from heat.

In a bowl mix sugars, egg, and vanilla together. Slowly add the butter to temper the eggs. Mix until well combined.

Mix in oats, flour, salt and baking powder until dough forms. Add in any chocolate chips, nuts etc. here.

Place in fridge for 20 minutes to chill.

Drop heaping tablespoons of dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Top each cookie dough ball with a dollop (around a tsp.) of peanut butter.

Bake for 12-14 minutes or until the cookies are golden.

Allow to cool for 10-15 minutes before eating (the peanut butter will be like lava!). These do become "crunchier" when fully cooled, so microwave a few seconds when enjoying later.