Best-Ever Cookies

Did you ever lose a favorite recipe? You know the kind I mean: the recipe card that has been in your recipe box for years and is now a bit tattered and stained from years of use. Well, I recently wanted to bake a batch of cookies I’ve been making since my kids were little, but couldn’t find that handwritten recipe card anywhere. It was one of those recipes copied from someone else with my own “tweaks” scribbled in the margins.

Bummer!

I searched a few of my recipe books and found a similar recipe. It had all the right ingredients, so I mixed up a batch and baked them for my mom’s friends who live with her in assisted living memory care. The cookies baked up a bit thin and crumbly. The ingredients were right, but were obviously not in the right proportions. My friend Lola’s husband is one of the residents who REALLY liked the not-quite-perfect cookies. She heard my lament about losing my recipe card and went home and searched through her cookbooks in an effort to find the recipe for me. Imagine my delight when she surprised me yesterday by bringing in a church cookbook with a recipe that looked to be closer to the ingredient proportions of my tweaked recipe. Unlike my lost recipe, this version had nuts and didn’t have chocolate chips in it (but that problem is easily remedied).

YAAY! I couldn’t wait to give the recipe a try.

Now, imagine my excitement this morning when I stumbled upon a forgotten blog draft I had created back on July 9th when I had last baked the cookies for my friends at BeeHive. Someone had asked for the recipe, so I had actually typed out my tweaked recipe with the intent of posting it on my blog.

Well, here it is!

Best-Ever Cookies

Ingredients –

• ½ c. butter (1 stick, softened)
• ½ c. shortening (or another stick of butter, which I prefer)
• ½ c. corn oil (or canola oil)
• ½ c. coconut oil (I use solid, but oil would work too)
• 1 c. brown sugar
• 1 c. granulated sugar
• 3 c. flour
• 1 t. salt
• 1 t. cream of tartar
• 1 egg
• 1 T. vanilla extract
• 1 ½ c. regular oats
• 1 c. flaked coconut
• 2 c. Rice Krispies
• 2 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips (variation: use a combination of semi-sweet, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, butterscotch chips)

Directions –

In a large mixing bowl, combine butter, shortening, corn and coconut oils, brown sugar and granulated sugar. Beat with electric mixer until creamy. Beat in flour, salt and cream of tartar, adding egg and vanilla extract until well combined.

Stir in oats, coconut, cereal, and your choice of chips. Stir until blended. Chill dough for a couple of hours. Scoop chilled dough (~ 1 T of dough) onto ungreased or parchment-lined baking sheets, leaving room between cookies for dough to spread a bit.

Bake at 350 ℉ for 12-14 minutes – until lightly browned on edges. Let set on baking sheet to cool for 10 minutes – cookie will continue to bake and set-up a bit. Remove from cookie sheet to cool completely, then store in air-tight storage container.

Note: the dough freezes well. I place the rounded scoops on a cookie sheet, then place in the freezer until hardened. I then put the frozen dough balls in a ZipLoc bag and freeze until ready to bake.

There is a lesson for my life in here somewhere. Sometimes my life contains all the right ingredients: church, family, personal Bible study, friends, prayer, ministry, housekeeping, gardening … and the like. But oftentimes the proportions are just not quite right. When I start feeling a little spread too thin and “not quite right,” nine times out of ten, I find the time spent in personal Bible study and prayer have diminished over time. Putting those ‘ingredients’ in the proper proportions in my life allows all the other priorities to meld together into a life that is truly satisfying and sweet – God’s ‘Best Ever’ for me.