Just a warning - these turned out to be possibly the worst cookies I've ever made.
So, this morning I decided to make cookies. I wanted something easy and quick, something tasty, and just something productive. I opened Instagram and pretty quickly saw an interesting recipe: Healthy Chocolate Chip Cookies. I know toying around with healthy desserts isn't always a recipe for success, but these cookies looked pretty simple and pretty darn good. So I got to it.
I pulled up the recipe on my phone, preheated the oven and got to work. My first challenge: oat flour. I didn't have any, but a quick search showed that a blender or food processor combined with oats would do the trick. My first mistake: I didn't really grind up the oats enough. My next challenge: almond butter. I didn't have any on-hand and the most common substitute for one nut butter is usually just a different type of nut butter, but I didn't really have this either. The best I could do was either Nutella or tahini, so I thought why not both! Both have pretty strong flavors and are definitely much more spreadable and thin than most almond butters, so I ended up with a confusing flavor and a pretty runny dough. Time to add more chunky, DIY oat flour. Next, the easy part: oil. Though I didn't have coconut oil on hand (shocker!), I decided butter would suffice, but of course I only had 1/2 the amount of butter required, so I then had to add some olive oil, which I wasn't thrilled about because olive oil also has such a strong taste. Suddenly, I'm replacing all of the base ingredients of this cookie recipe with oddly strong flavors that don't really come together well.
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| The runny, gritty dough full of potential. |
I added the rest of the ingredients (and tasted the dough a bit of course), and nervously placed my 'cookies' in the oven. As the 12 minutes on the timer ticked down to 10, 9, then 6 minutes left, the house filled with a delicious aroma: sweet, savory, chocolatey... I was excited. I peek in the oven and am surprised to see that the cookies haven't spread as much as I thought they would (good news!) and they're looking pretty good. The timer dings and I excitedly take the cookies out of the oven. "I've just created my very own type of cookie!" I thought. I split one cookie in two and hand half to my mom and bring the other half to my mouth - the smell is something I can't quite place, the texture is slightly cakey (probably due to me eyeballing the amount of baking soda and adding a bit too much), and the taste is... well... there's not much flavor to be honest with you. The best part of the cookie is the chocolate chunks, and beyond that it really wasn't much. The texture was chewy and grainy from the under-ground oat flour and the flavor was a confusing mix of chocolate, hazelnut, and molasses from the coconut sugar.
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| They looked even worse in person. |
I still had a little dough left, so I decided to make some adjustments to this batch: I added a little more sugar to sweeten the cookies up a little, I added a splash of coffee to deepen the chocolate flavor (I didn't have any cocoa powder) and added a little flour to counteract the addition of liquid. I mixed it all up, scooped it all out, popped it in the oven, waited 13 minutes, pulled them out of the oven, excitedly took a bite, and...the slightest of improvements.
This baking process might have really pained any official baker to read, but the experimentation was fun (although the results were slightly disappointing). Lesson learned. Don't substitute ingredients in a recipe you've never tried before and check your pantry for ingredients BEFORE starting the baking process.
Also, a disclaimer - I'm sure if you actually follow the original recipe the way you're supposed to, the results could be pretty tasty. This failure was definitely a result of my own confidence and had nothing to do with the original recipe.
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