milk and cookies

After an invigorating yoga class tonight, I found myself craving something sweet. I tried to think what I wanted that wouldn’t be a sugar rush to be followed by a later headache, and something mildly good for me. My favorite dessert in the world is Tiramisu (hello cream) and someday I will teach myself how to make a fabulous one, but today was not that day. Actually two of my favorite friends have attempted this fabulous dessert recently, and both have turned out incredibly boozy. While I would never complain about such offenses, every bite felt like I was taking a shot, and that’s not really what I was looking for tonight, or willing to take a chance on.
What better to go with my already published raw-milk-soapbox-rant earlier today than cookies?! Yum :) In college, while I was busy not-studying, I developed my own recipe for chocolate chip cookies. My boyfriend at the time was a bit of a cookie fiend and being the cutsie girlfriend that I was, I wanted to impress him with the best chocolate chip cookies he had ever had. (Somewhat ridiculous now thinking about it…) Nevertheless, they were full of refined white sugar, excessive butter and bleached flour. Don’t get me wrong, they were fantastic but as I was sitting down trying to think of what to make tonight, it dawned on me: a slow cookie, or one that meets most, if not all of the requirements of the slow food movement (ie. what this blog is supposed to be doing in the first place!) would be fantastic to have on hand.
 So I scoured the interwebs looking for cookie recipes that were low in sugar, used natural (and local) ingredients and looked delicious. I modeled my recipe after the one I found at peace, love and muesli (fantastic blog), and used some cookie techniques I learned when I was on my cookie conquest in college. Here is what I came up with:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. Cream 1 cup of unsalted butter in an electric mixer
3. Add 1 ½ cups of brown sugar and mix until fluffy
4. Add 4 eggs, then 2 ts. of vanilla, while mixer is running on low.
5. In a separate bowl combine and mix together:

• 2 ts. of baking soda
• 2 ts. of baking powder 
• 1 ts. of salt 

• 3 ½ cups of whole wheat pastry flour (see later blog-soapbox-rant on flour) 
• ½ c of ground flaxseed meal 
• 3 c. of raw oatmeal 
• 1 c. of coconut flakes

6. Now slowly add this mixture to the electric mixer
7. Add in about 8-10 oz of dark chocolate chunks. I broke up a Theo chocolate bar (some of the best chocolate around and conveniently less than a mile away) with 70% cacao. Then also add a few handfuls of semisweet chips or pieces of a broken up bar, maybe 4-5 oz.
8. I scooped them onto my baking pans then pressed them down a little since it is a pretty thick batter and I wanted a flatter cookie.

9. Cook for 10-12 min or until very lightly brown.

So there you have it, a cookie that is delicious, nutritious and relatively “slow”. Looks like I will be enjoying a midnight milk and cookies snack!

Bon Appetite!

Total Prep/Cooking Time: Mixing dough: 20 min & baking: appx 1 hr, but it depends on how many cookies you get on your baking sheets, and how many baking sheets you have.
Total Cost: roughly $10-$15