James LOVES oatmeal cookies, so I spent the better part of one summer trying various recipes out on him, eventually settling on the Cook’s Illustrated Big, Chewy Oatmeal Cookie recipe. They passed muster with James at the time, but they weren’t completely plant-based, so I haven’t been making them of late. After poring over my various vegan cookbooks, James presented me with a recipe from Isa Chandra Moscowitz’s Jumbo Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies from Isa Does It.

Update: These cookies turned out brilliantly, BUT the crumbli-ness was a bit of a pain, so I tried them again, but replaced the white sugar with maple syrup. The result was excellent! Mind you, you still need to be careful until they’re cool, but they hold together MUCH better with the added liquid of the maple syrup (and, oddly, you can’t taste the maple syrup in the finished product!).

Here’s the adapted recipe:

Jumbo Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies

Ingredients/Directions:

Cream together in a stand-up mixer:

• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/3 cup  brown sugar
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 cup applesauce
• 1 TBS ground flaxseed

Add:

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Sift together and add to the mix:

• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt

Once the mixture is smooth, add:

• 1 1/2 cups rolled oats
• 3/4 cup raisins

The dough doesn’t really stick together very well, so you need to use a quarter-cup scoop to make the cookies. Pat down the top to flatten the raw cookies out. They don’t spread much, but if you leave lots of room around them, they’ll crisp up nicely.

Bake at 350 for 14 minutes.

Leave them on the cookie sheets to cool completely or they’ll fall apart when you eat them!

The recipe makes about 11 cookies.

Now, just look at that lovely, healthy(ish) cookie!! Other than less than half a cup of sugar and a quarter cup of oil in the whole batch, everything else in these cookies is actually good for you!

And they are DELICIOUS!! James loves them….and so does Buster-the-photobomber!!