No, you are not seeing things. Nobody spiked your drink. Aliens did not kidnap me and replace me with a replica.

Yeah, John baked something.

Granted, I baked cookies but with my serious lack of baking talents, cookies are considered an accomplishment. I have no idea why, but baking is my personal kitchen kryptonite – just the thought of baking makes me twitchy. I like baked foods, I just have a genetic condition that prevents me from making them. Yeah, that’s it!

Cookies are a relatively easy thing to make, and are typically one of the first recipes that a child starts learning the cooking arts with, so I was pretty sure I could pull them off successfully.

And I was also very wrong. The first batch of these cookies I made turned out great and were a big hit with all my taste testers, but in a brilliant move of epic smooveness, I formatted the memory card the pictures were on by mistake and had to make a second batch for the pictures in this post. I also decided to tweak the recipe on batch #2 a little and the results were a complete and total failure, so what you are getting here is pictures of one batch and the recipe from a totally different one! Yep, I hate baking.

I got the idea for these cookies while wandering around the aisles at my local Costco. I saw oatmeal cookies in the bakery and thought ‘ooh – those look good, but not in bulk’, and on the way out the door I noticed a bag of dried blueberries and thought ‘I’ll bet those would be good in cookies’. Much like the old Reeses Peanut Butter Cups commercials where the person holding the peanut butter and the person holding the chocolate collide and create the ultimate snack food, the memory of the cookies ran smack into my current mental image of the blueberries and I had my plan!

Batch One of these cookies was made just like old fashioned, completely unhealthy cookies should be – with butter and regular old general purpose white flour. I did cut the sugar content a little by using Splenda’s brown sugar blend in place of the brown sugar called for in the recipe, but that was about as close to healthy as this recipe gets. These are pretty much old fashioned, unhealthy, deliciously sweet and fattening cookies. Sometimes you just have to eat the bad things!

I did toss in one somewhat unusual ingredient as I was meddling – I had purchased a bag of mesquite powder (also called mesquite flour) last year when Amity mentioned how delicious it was in baked goods and since it had never been used, I decided to throw some in the mix and see what happened. Anyone who grills knows the word ‘mesquite’ – it is a scraggly hard wood from the SouthWest that is frequently used for smoking meats – but the bean pods of the mesquite are also a food source. The pods are dried and ground into a flour and used in cakes and other baked goods, and impart a sweet, somewhat cinnamon-y flavor to the finished food.

For Batch two, I decided to make a healthier version of the cookies with faux butter and whole wheat four, and it just flat out failed. The cookies tasted good, but wouldn’t firm up enough to be removed from the baking sheets in a single piece. Yep, I hate baking…

So while you are looking at the pictures, keep telling yourself ‘those are the good cookies’ and make the recipe the unhealthy way. You will like them much better that way.

Oatmeal & Blueberry Cookies

Ingredients (for approx. 24 cookies):

• 1 cup all-purpose flour (ignore the whole wheat flour in the picture!!!)
• 2 Tablespoons mesquite flour/powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup firmly packed Splenda brown sugar blend
• 1 large egg
• 1/4 cup water
• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 2 1/2 cups rolled oats
• 1 cup dried blueberries

Preparation:

Step 1 : Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Step 2 : In a bowl or large Pyrex measuring cup, mix together the flour, mesquite powder, salt, and baking soda and set aside.

Step 3 : In a large bowl, mix the softened butter and Splenda brown sugar blend together until it is creamy. Add the water, vanilla, and egg and continue mixing until the batter is semi-smooth.

Step 4 : Add the flour mixture to the bowl and mix until everything is fully incorporated and the dough is once again smooth.

Step 5 : Add the oats and blueberries to the dough and stir to combine.

Step 6 : Use a spoon or your hands to make golf ball sized balls of the dough and place them on a cookie sheet at least 2 inches apart. You should be able to get 12 balls per sheet.

Step 7 : Bake the cookies in the 350 degree oven for 14 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for about 10 minutes before eating / storing.

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