Okay
@Jimi this is for you, but I already know what you should change from the way I did it. Jacques Pepin once said the first one is always for the dog.
You start with your cooked oatmeal, making sure it's well salted. All chocolate chip cookie recipes have salt, to bring out the sweetness.
I used instant oatmeal because it's what I have. If I bought the kind of oats you cook on the stove I would make it once, and then two years later I'd be throwing away the rest of the box. I know because I've done that a couple of times.
So make your oatmeal the way you make it, but
less runny. You want a
dough consistency, not a hot cereal consistency.
Where I used avocado oil, you should probably use coconut oil because I think you've mentioned you have it. When cooked, it doesn't taste coconutty. It tastes buttery. But if you don't have it, then use avocado oil or your favorite vegan butter melted.
Unlike with most recipes, when I don't pre-heat the oven, I preheated for this because I wanted the cookies to start sizzling right away. I brushed the sheet with avo oil and put it in the oven while pre-heating.
I mixed up my organic instant oatmeal with hot water, four single serve packets, not too much water, again for a
dough consistency. I mixed in the salt, and a couple tablespoons of avocado oil to make it sizzle from the inside, then poured on maple syrup to cover the top of the dough, not tons of syrup, just a thin layer over the top of the dough, then mixed it all up again. Use how much syrup you want, and taste as you go. You may even want to use your medjool date syrup.
Then I added about a cup of broken up pecans, not finely chopped, but you can chop them finely if you want.
View attachment 210372
Then about 3/4 cup dark chocolate chips (more about that below). I really could have used less chocolate.
Here's what I did wrong: I used a regular size ice cream scoop to apportion the dough into cookies on the sheet, and pressed them down a little bit. However, these do not spread out when baking like the flour/eggs dough, so when you do it, just use a tablespoon or two for each cookie, and pat it out into a flat disc. That's to give it maximum crispiness. No matter what you do, the center will stay tender.
Here they are done:
View attachment 210373
And I used two of them to make an ice cream sandwich, because I was born bad.
View attachment 210374
So what will you do for chocolate chips? I'm sure there several brands of organic, vegan chocolate chips with no sugar added, but the only one I could find easily was the Hu brand, which is sweetened with dates:
View attachment 210371
You shouldn't have to get it from Amazon. Several stores around here carry that brand. I'll try to find more brands of organic vegan non-sugar for you. I find the Lily brand, sweetened with stevia, to be unsatisfying, but some of my friends like it.
You can cook with organic cacao nibs, right out of the package. If they go into your oatmeal when you cook it, they'll take on the sweetness of the maple syrup, and the challenge is solved that way.
Once I get more oatmeal packets I'll try again. I'm enjoying the ones I made today. They hold together, but they're too big and fat. I want to see them perfected.
Of course you can add dates, raisins, dried cranberries, pumpkin seeds, whatever you love, but don't add apples or anything that will make the dough more wet. I was aiming for a chocolate chip cookie, not an oatmeal cookie.
