Maple Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

I generally like for my posts to have something creative in the title; as Cooper once told me, all good titles must have a colon. However, all my creative energies are currently going toward my CJT790 final report, and the color-coding of themes that emerge from 12 engaged women's experiences with planning weddings. Besides that, I ran outside 6 miles today, which is the longest I've ever run, ever, and I bet the run sucked out the remainder of my brain cells.

However, I made these cookies last week and I have felt the need to blog about them, mostly so I don't forget the recipe or what I did wrong. I saw Anne's recent post about Maple Strawberry Muffins, and for some reason I just had to have something with maple in it. So I found a recipe and adjusted it based on what I had in my cabinets and needed to get rid of. Here is my version of:

Maple Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups oats, quick cooking
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350. In small bowl, mix ingredients flour-nutmeg together with a fork; set aside. In medium to large bowl, cream together butter and sugar on low/medium speed with a hand mixer. Pour in syrup and vanilla, combine with mixer. Add in eggs one at a time. Gradually add in flour/oat mixture until just combined. On greased (or Pam-sprayed) cookie sheet, drop by tablespoon. Bake for 10 minutes, cool, and enjoy.

When I made these, there were a few things that went wrong, but still resulted in a yummy cookie. For one, the original recipe only called for 1 1/4 cups flour and 1 1/4 cups oats. I used the correct amount of flour but used about 2 cups of oats because I wanted to get rid of all the oats I had in my cabinet (I'm leaving for summer in about 2 weeks and am trying to rid the cabinets of a lot of things). I also used only one egg, per the original recipe (again). I also didn't have quite 1/2 cup of brown sugar, so I used about 1/3 cup brown sugar and filed the space remaining in my measuring cup with white sugar. And, I only had about 1/3 cup of raisins. They were still very tasty and flavorful, but they were too crumbly in my opinion. I brought the entire batch to the office in a ziploc bag, and within about 2 hours, they weren't so much cookies as they were a granola-ish trail mix. Luckily, my colleagues are usually desperate for food so no one seemed to mind. Someone even mentioned baking them longer and making a cereal out of it, which is not a terrible idea. I think that with my tweaks as noted above, they would actually work as cookies. Again, I haven't actually made them with that recipe, but it's just what I figure will work better next time. Let me know if they don't work for you.