I picked a ton of fresh strawberries this weekend. Well, two gallons to be exact. Which, naturally, means there will be a deluge of strawberry-related baking in the next few days (before I get buried in a mountain of final projects to grade). Thus: strawberry oatmeal cookies.
These bright delights of flavor are actually an adaptation of one of my favorite cookie recipes from the Ambitious Kitchen blog. While a lot of her recipes veer too far into healthy territory for me to be willing to try, she’s got some excellent cookie recipes and introduced me to a magical secret of baking: coconut oil.
These cookies (and her double chocolate cookies which I’ll eventually end up writing a post about) use coconut oil as the fat and are consequently wonderfully chewy. These also stay chewy and moist for days after baking. She uses frozen blueberries in the original (I’ve made those before – and they’re amazing), but the cookie base adapted just fine to fresh strawberries.
I’m not typically a fan of either white chocolate or strawberries (though this week looks likely to cure me of the latter character flaw), but these cookies are wonderfully summery, and I can’t wait to get them out of my house so I stop eating them.
Strawberry Oatmeal Cookies (adapted from Ambitious Kitchen)
Grade: A
- 1/2 cup melted coconut oil
- 2/3 cup dark brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 egg
- 1 cup all purpose flour
- 1 1/4 cups rolled oats
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup sweetened shredded coconut
- 2 oz good-quality white chocolate bar, coarsely chopped (a little over 1/2 cup)
- roughly a cup of finely chopped strawberries
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In large bowl whisk together flour, oats, baking soda, and salt; set aside.
In bowl of an electric mixer beat together melted coconut oil and brown sugar until smooth. Add in egg and vanilla and beat again for 1-2 minutes or until smooth.
Stir in flour & oat mixture to the wet ingredients; mixing until well combined. Slowly fold in coconut and white chocolate chunks.
Use a cookie scoop to gather a rounded spoonful of dough. Flatten the dough in the palm of your hand and add a few pieces of chopped strawberry on top. Roll or squish the dough back into a ball and place on the cookie sheet. This process will get pretty goopy/sticky fast, and you’ll likely need to rinse your hands a few times during the process. I can make about 5-6 balls before more dough sticks to my hand than the ball.
I use a size 60 cookies scoop (2 tsp) for most of my baking, and at that size, these came out beautifully at 8.5 minutes. For larger balls (a tablespoon, for example) I’d aim for 10-12 minutes, but careful not to overbake. Watch for the edges to just begin to turn golden brown.
Remove from oven and cool for a few minutes on baking sheet until the cookies firm up a bit. They’ll be pretty fragile at first. Transfer to a wire rack to allow cookies to cool completely.
Baker on the Run 