Oat Cookies.

I like oat, and I like cookies, and consequently I also like oat cookies. There's the kind that you can buy at IKEA, for instance - flat and crunchy and oaty and... sweet. Very, very sweet.

I've had a bit of a fancy for oat biscuits for a while recently, but wasn't willing to buy them, because of a) their overboarding sweetness and b) plastic packaging. Then came an opportunity to bake some... so I did what I usually do when something like this comes up. I trawl the Biggest Of All Cookbooks (aka the internet), pick out about a gazillion of recipes, look at all of them and then I either mash up between two and five of them, or I take one and modify it according to my whim. Sometimes both. (In very extreme cases, the recipe that I pick gets slaughtered so completely that there's not too much over of the original... but hey, it's just guidelines anyways, right?)

In this case, I stuck with the typical modification that I make when getting baking recipes off the 'net, which is reducing the sugar contents. I might also adjust butter quantities, and I always substitute butter if the recipe calls for margarine or shortening; I also use spelt flour instead of wheat as a standard mod. That's a leftover habit from the time when I had trouble digesting wheat; fortunately, that is not the case anymore, but I've just stuck with using spelt as my standard flour. No point in overdoing it with the wheat consumption and tempting fate! This time, the original recipe called for spelt already, so no switch needed.

The cookies were supposed to go all puddle-y in the oven, as in "melt into flat thin shapes" and then crisp up. Mine didn't, which may be due to the slight modifications I made - possibly they'd do that more if the oven temperature is a little lower, and they are instead baked for longer, but the dome shapes were nice, too. I pressed them a bit flatter once I realised they would not flatten themselves, which let them turn out a bit crunchier.

So, here you go - my recipe for sweet, but not overly sweet, oat cookies:

100 g butter
100 g rolled oats
60 g brown sugar
30 g honey
1 tsp vanilla sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon, ground
120 g wholegrain spelt flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
45 g almond flakes (optional: roast these in a dry pan)
60 ml milk

Melt butter and let it cool a bit again. Mix butter, sugar and honey together. Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then stir in the butter mixture; this will form a crumbly mass. Now add the milk to form a sticky dough.

With wet hands, form c. 36 small balls and place them on baking sheets. Leave enough space between cookie balls so they won't run together (in case they do run, which mine didn't). Bake for about 10-15 mins at 180°C, no fan. (Maybe try 160° and see if they will go flatter.)

Once cool, store in an airtight container if you like to keep them crisp.

Enjoy!