Chocolatey Oaty Goodness

I used the same recipe (from Baking Illustrated) for these as I used for the Loaded Oatmeal Cookies from last week — with a few obvious and not-so-obvious changes. For one, I used 1-1/2 cups chocolate chips, rather than the nuts, fruits, and veggies that went into the other cookies. I also omited the nutmeg, as suggested by BI. The next time I make them I will probably put the nutmeg back in because I just like the way the nutmeg enhances the flavor of the oats, and I think it might make a more complex, flavorful cookie.  As they turned out, I thought these were good — but more like extra filling, extra chewy chocolate chip cookies.  I felt like the flavor of the oats took a backseat to the chocolate, and I wonder if just that little bit of extra spice might create some more balance.

One cookie tray went splat: light butter or oven placement?

Less obvious:  The recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter, and I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to “lighten” up the recipe.  So, I used 1 stick of regular, unsalted butter and one stick of light butter.  The light butter was salted, so I also decreased the amount of salt I added into the cookies by about 1/2.  This was my first time using light butter, and I was surprised by how different it is in texture.  When I tried to soften the butters in my microwave before creaming them, the light butter melted completely while the regular butter merely softened up a bit.  I’m not sure how much this difference affected the final product.  Taste-wise, I don’t think they were any different.

Some of the cookies were more crumbly than my last batch of oatmeal cookies, but I think that may have had more to do with oven placement than anything else. It seems like the cookies that start out on the middle oven rack — further from the heat source — spread and flatten rather than puffing into a voluptuous, full-figured cookie.  I had a very similar problem last time.

I do think all of the cookies, regardless of their flatness or fullness, got very crumbly after a few days (one person called them “trail mix cookies”), and I wonder if this has something to do with the different fat. Maybe next time I will experiment with using light butter exclusively.  We’ll see.