The best thing about browsing recipes on a Saturday afternoon is being able to make a recipe immediately. No planning or waiting - just instant cookie gratification.
I made the recipe for Itsy Bitsy Chocolate Chip Cookies shortly after I first read it. They sounded like the perfect thing to have on a snack night, which was exactly what Saturday night was shaping up to be. I talked Alex into helping me shape the cookies, since the recipe was supposed to make 12 dozen.
I did make a few adjustments for this recipe. I used pecans since I didn't have walnuts, and I chopped/pulverized them in a food chopper rather than chop them by hand. Chopping by hand would have been more precise. I didn't have "good" chocolate, but I felt my chocolate chips were good enough, so I tried grinding them in the food chopper, too. (I weighed out the 5 ounces, but it was probably between ¾ and 1 cup.) I think my whole wheat flour was pastry flour. I used brown sugar and had molasses (thanks to my friend Karen's pantry).
We somehow got more than 12 dozen cookies out of this. We baked each sheet at a time since it took us about that long to load the next pan up with cookie dough. We forgot to pat down the first batch after we put them on the pan. We patted out the cookies for the next few sheets, but we didn't sprinkle them with sugar. We tried out a few from each batch and decided that we liked the first, less flat, less crunchy cookies best, so that's how our final batch was.
These won't replace regular chocolate chip cookies, but they were pretty good. I enjoyed the bites with pieces of chocolate in them, and I liked the texture of the oats in the cookies. They were the perfect party cookie - they were bite-sized and there were lots of them, so you don't have to worry about some of your guests not eating any. In fact, they're more likely to eat them because they can eat one or two or five, rather than being stuck eating (or sharing) a whole cookie.
The way I made these resulted in a departure from the original recipe. The nuts blended in and the chocolate melted into the cookie dough, so they were as much chocolate-oatmeal cookies as they were chocolate chip cookies. I think I'd just use mini-chocolate chips in them next time, rather than try to chop up bar chocolate or chocolate chips. We liked these best when we didn't flatten out the cookies, but we still baked them for 7 minutes.
These were cute little cookies, and I think they're perfect for sharing. I'll probably make them again sometime.
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