LUXURY OATMEAL COOKIES

SPECIAL COOKIE EQUIPMENT

• baking trays , acurate scale , stand mixer or a hand mixer

MAKING GRANOLA

• Love granola!

Rolled oats, dark brown sugar and cinnamon.

• Love it, but I like it crunchy and toasty.

Granola is ready for the oven.

• This granola had that raw, soggy oatmeal thing going on. If I had left it in the oven longer, I'm sure it would have been more to my taste. I also want to note that the recipe yielded just over 4 cups, not 5 like the book indicated. Maybe I did something wrong? Dunno.

COOKIE DOUGH

• I should probably note that I didn't use raisins, but dried prunes instead simply because I had them on hand.

Chopped dried prunes.

• The cookie dough came together without a hitch.

A gag shot. Caught my attention…

My mighty Kitchen Aid.

• I really didn't feel like separating the dough into thirds and wrapping each piece in plastic, so I left the dough in the mixing bowl and covered the bowl with plastic. The next day, I spooned some dough onto the counter, put the bowl back in the fridge

Only some of the cold cookie dough on the counter.

• and formed my cookies.

Self explanatory.

Forming the cookies.

• I should also note that I REALLY enjoyed the raw cold dough. I definitely liked it better than the baked cookie.

BAKE THE COOKIES

• I had difficulty determining when the cookies were done. They were certainly brown along the edges, and soft in the center, and I knew they needed to be chewy when cool, but I didn't want them to be raw. How soft is too soft was the burning question. So I erred on the side of softer.

They looked done to me.

Luxury oatmeal cookies, The Finer Cookie.

Luxury oatmeal cookies, The Finer Cookie.

• HERE'S HOW THE ALPHA BAKERS WORK: once a week, for the next two years, 25 Alpha Bakers commit to baking their way through every recipe of Rose Levy Beranbaum's newly published The Baking Bible. Each week we post our experiences on our blog sites: our successes, our failures, our like and dislikes . The recipes are scheduled in advance so that everyone is baking the same recipe at the same time. No recipes can be shared in my Alpha Bakers Baking Bible posts due to publishing restrictions enforced by the publisher, but if you love to bake, this is a must-have book. You can see other tutorials for the same recipe at the following link The Baking Bible Alpha Bakers at http://rosesalphabakers.blogspot.ca/.