Week 2 - Oatmeal Raisin Cookies and TLCs

Week two already! I discovered this week that raisins are very polarizing - people either love them or HATE them! I'm firmly in the "I love raisins" camp, but I can definitely understand how someone might not like them.

Photos and thoughts are throughout - feel free to scroll to see what interests you or click:
- Oatmeal Raisin - Take 1
- TLCs
- Oatmeal Raisin - Take 2
Want to skip to my conclusion? Click here

My Bake Through partner Kristen went all out (again!) and adapted the recipe - I strongly recommend you check out her post as well.

TWO COOKIE RECIPES IN ONE WEEK! This week was fun, because the recipes themselves are so similar. They even face each other in the book with the TLC's, and the origin of the TLC's are from oatmeal raisin beginnings:

Some inventions happen just because we’re having fun. When Sebastien discovered that my partner, Laura Cunningham, liked oatmeal cookies but had been picking out the raisins (she doesn’t like dried fruit), he decided to make a cookie in her honour, replacing the fruit with nuts. Thus The Laura Cunningham, aka TLC, was born.

Raisin haters unite! This is a great cookie, and even though we aren't publishing the recipes on this blog, a clever Google-r will resolve this issue. ;)

Onto the cookies themselves!

"Oatmeal Raisin Cookies" - The original recipe

When I think of oatmeal raisin cookies, I think of a warm, homey, cinnamon-y, soft bite cookie that isn't too sweet, and tastes 'good for you' enough that you can eat two for breakfast without that pang of guilt. These definitely hit the mark. The flavour of these cookies is lovely - just enough cinnamon, not overly sweet but the sweetness gets punched up by the raisins. And soft with crispy bits around the edges.

The process of these cookies really reminded me of my all time favourite cookie, the Blueberry and Cream cookie by Christina Tosi of Milk Bar. Whipping the butter until it's soft and then refrigerating the dough, resulting in a crispy-on-the-outside-chewy-in-the-center cookie. The best of both worlds, really.

I followed this recipe exactly, with one exception. I didn't have a variety of raisins, so I used what I had on-hand - sultanas. I thought I had other raisins in my pantry but no - and I honestly have enough sultanas that having more raisins of different variety was hard to justify. I also got busy when soaking the raisins, which means that they soaked for around 90 mins, three times longer than prescribed. Whoops. The book mentions that Bouchon believes that cookies should be big, and so these fit that directive. It includes instructions for smaller cookies as well, so I baked half of the cookies following the regular-size directions, and half following the half-size directions, giving me nine cookies for each recipe.

Kristen and I chatted after she'd baked hers but before I baked mine, and as a result I did not squish them down, but baked them from a ball in hopes to escape the spreading that she experienced.

This did not work, and the cookies were HUGE and thin. I was SO disappointed.

This is the half-size cookie - 72g, at a whopping 4.75". The standard 145g cookie is supposed to be 4" across.

My observations:

I think these were too wet. Did I soak the raisins too long? Probably. I also neglected to dry them off. Oops.
Colder dough will likely prevent the cookies from spreading too much, but it also might impede the baking time.
I need to do this recipe again with a couple of modifications (see below for the result)
These cookies are pretty delicious, and huge
I like the smaller ones, they baked up crispier and are a nicer size for snacking
opening my oven door to rotate the pans likely lost a lot of heat, so I think that affected the outcome - these were underbaked and needed another 6 minutes of oven time.
I double checked the flour on these. My cup of flour weighs 142g. If you go off the side of a bag of flour, 1/4c weighs 30g (extrapolating to 120g for a cup). The weight of the flour called for in the recipe makes sense (for my kitchen) to the volumes he gave, so I didn't adjust (I will normally adjust a recipe if it calls for 1 cup/120g of flour).

Photos of the process:

Oatmeal Raisin cookies - take 1

TLCs - Original Recipe

These cookies are surprisingly tasty, not too sweet and a new favourite of my partner B. These are good, but honestly - if I was going to make these again I'd add a bit of salt, I found the flavour could use some boosting. So far we're 2/3 recipes baked with no salt - I think the most surprising thing yet is the lack of salt in the recipes.

I've never had an oatmeal cookie before that didn't have raisins and/or chocolate chips - this is a low-sweetness cookie that is a nice change from the standard oatmeal raisin.

Changes I made to this recipe:

I used ground vanilla instead of a bean, since that's what I had on hand
I toasted the pecans, because toasting nuts brings out their lovely flavour.

These cookies baked up much, much nicer than the oatmeal raisin did. They retained some of the volume (they're NOT flat!), and they're everything in texture I was wishing from the oatmeal raisin. They're also appropriately sized, even though they're still a little on the large size.

4.5" TLC Cookie - this is also the 72g version.

My observations:

The dough felt better overall than the first round of the oatmeal raisin cookies
The cookie scoop that he suggests using is not adequate to contain the weight of the dough per cookie, so I ended up just using my hands to pull dough out of the bowl
These were in the fridge for 5 mins longer and in a smaller bowl, and so I'm hopeful that doing this when I re-make the oatmeal raisin cookies this helps the end result favourably.

Process photos

TLC photos

Oatmeal Raisin - original recipe - take two

I had high hopes for my second round. I followed the recipe exactly again - this time soaking the raisins for the prescribed time, let the dough sit in the fridge for 45 mins and I baked them for the prescribed time, ensuring my oven was hot enough the whole way through.

For this attempt I even heated the bowl of my mixer in order to achieve "beurre pommade" (which was a new term for me!) - basically soft, warm, spreadable butter, the consistency of mayonnaise. My first round of cookies I relied on my mixer to warm the butter up enough.

The result?

They spread more. And were even *more* underbaked.

You can actually see the raw dough in the centre here, so I baked them for another 6 mins.

Argh. I wish I knew how to fix this. I'd love to have them a bit less spread out and a bit thicker.

Looks aside, this is one tasty cookie.

That's a big cookie :D

Overall thoughts & conclusions

The internet seems to have a hate on for scales in baking, I've noticed. This recipe calls for a couple of ingredients measured in tenths of a gram, which is strange unless you consider this is a bakery cookbook, so the scale of the recipe is going to be a fraction of what they're baking for production (large volume). Suddenly 7.7g of cinnamon doesn't seem so weird, but I also get that not everyone has multiple scales. I've got so many kitchen scales at my disposal at this point that I think Amazon probably thinks I'm up to something no good *laughs*.
Both cookies are delicious, but the oatmeal raisin cookies really did it for me. Unlike Kristen, I'm a cinnamon fan :)
B really loved the TLCs - I'm tempted to make them again at a future date.
If you like cookies, I encourage you to make your own version or try searching the internet for these recipes - they're worth making and easy to do. I did them in my stand mixer but you could easily do these with a hand mixer.
I really tried to get this up for 10 am, next week I'll plan better :D