A rainy weekend, an empty cookie jar … why not try out a new cookie recipe? 

In general, I love the recipes in King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking book. So I thought I’d try a new one—a cookie recipe called All Oats All the Time. 

It’s an intriguing recipe with ground oats and nuts instead of flour. It’s also pretty low in fat, for a cookie.

My first warning was the texture of the dough. It was quite wet. I re-read the recipe to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any ingredients—nope, everything was in there. Still I hesitated—should I add a little flour?

No. King Arthur recipes are good ones—this would be fine. I carried on, dropping teaspoons of dough onto my greased cookie sheets. 

Five minutes in the oven, and I knew I had a problem. The cookies had spread into one another. Not horribly, but creating the thin edge, thick centre combination characteristic of a dough that’s simply too wet.

Okay, fine. They wouldn’t look nice, but they’d be okay.

I pulled them out of the oven before those thin edges burned. The recipe said to let them cool five minutes on the pan before removing them. Once again I hesitated. Would those thin edges lift off after five minutes?

Once again, I went with the recipe. 

After five minutes, those cookies were virtually cemented to the pans, and they’d turned super crisp, so the moment you managed to wedge the spatula under one, it shattered.

I experienced a moment of despair, thinking I was going to spend an hour chipping inedible cookies off the pans, and then scrubbing the pans until all that baked-on gunk was gone. But then I thought of cheesecake crust, and how these crumbly cookies would make a lovely crust, or maybe a fruit crisp topping. And once I no longer cared if the cookies crumbled, it was a snap to scrape them off the pans. The pans came clean easily after a short soaking. 

On Monday, I picked up the ingredients for cheesecake and made little cheesecake cupcakes using my crumbled cookies in a crust, with a little sprinkling of crumbled cookie on top. The results are pretty darned good—certainly better than the original cookie alone.

I’ve still got a fair bit of crushed cookie left—it has gone into the freezer for use in some other interesting way.

So maybe the cookies weren’t such a disaster after all.