These are the most popular cookies that I make.  I always think they don’t look amazing but when I serve them warm, they seem to disappear, no matter how many I bake. The key to keeping them soft is pulling them out when the edges have just started to brown but the center is still white.  If you keep the dough in the fridge, you can have warm cookies in minutes.

Warm Rocky Road Cookies (Oatmeal Chocolate Chip)

  • Servings: 12
  • Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

  • IMG_64801/2 cup butter (I use salted)
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 1 Tbsp. milk
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour (or use a 50/50 whole wheat and white mixture)
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 cup quick cooking oats (or regular oats will work)
  • 6 oz. chocolate chips (about 1/2 cup)
  • optional 1/2 cup walnuts or pecans

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350ºF convection (will work on non-convection too)
  2. With beaters (hand held or a mixer) cream room-temperature butter and add brown and white sugars.  Beat well.
  3. Add the egg, milk & vanilla.  Beat again, until light and fluffy.
  4. Mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.  Add to batter and mix only until blended.
  5. Add in oats. Again, stir/beat only until blended.  Gently stir in chocolate chips.
  6. Chill the dough for at least an hour (or longer).  Place heaping teaspoons of cold dough onto cookie sheet.  Bake 7-8 minutes. Remove cookies from oven while center still looks uncooked, and edges are slightly browned. This will give you chewy cookies (the way my kids likes them).  If you want them crispier, leave in the oven until center looks lightly toasted.



Lessons Learned/Advice:

  • If your butter is cold and you have a microwave, warm it for 30 seconds on half power to soften it without melting it
  • You can mix the batter by hand if you don’t have beaters…just beat until fluffy
  • Optional ingredients include the nuts mentioned above and salt flakes sprinkled on top
  • Key to making these is baking them when they are cold and taking them out of the oven when they look under-done.  If you don’t have time to chill all the dough, place the cookies on the cookie sheet and chill the whole pan with the cookies. This will chill them quickly but because the pan is cold it might take an extra minute to bake them
  • I use parchment paper, but alternately, you can lightly grease your pan.
  • I find the dough keeps at least a couple weeks in the fridge but you can also freeze it. I haven’t tried this but my guess is you can bake frozen ones but I’d lower the temperature to 325ºF.  If you are going freezing the dough, I suggest you freeze it in pre-shaped balls (see picture below).  You can easily make a double batch!
  • You can bake the dough free-form or rolled into balls; below is a pan that is half rolled and half free-form so you can see the difference. The rolled ones have a more uniform shape.

 

Credits:

Recipes similar to this one can be found many places. The idea of baking chilled and pulling them out when they are under-cooked comes from the Silver Palate Cookbook.