Serves: Makes ~12 cookies
Cost: ~€0.80
Preparation and cooking time: 30 minutes
Calories: ~114 per cookie
I’m taking a brief break from my series of posts on increasing website performance today. I didn’t want anyone to think I’d abandoned cooking entirely during that time and so I decided to post these which I’m very happy to share with you today, because, for me, these are pretty much the epitome of a “taste from my childhood”. I can remember my mother making these since I was young enough to remember anything. The amount of sugar in them is very low – just 50g in this batch, and ~2tsps of Golden Syrup, which means there’s only about 4g of sugar per cookie and about 1/15 of a teaspoon of syrup (if my calculations are correct), making them a favourite of my father, who isn’t too keen on overly sweet things.
The recipe was a magazine cut-out – clipped out by my mother many moons ago and stored in a great book of similar cuttings in her bookshelf containing all her recipe books. For a while we had these cookies in our house pretty much all the time, and then… shock horror… the recipe clipping went missing (or rather we just didn’t have them for a while, forgot all about them and then no-one remembered where the clipping was anymore). In any case, I remembered them recently and asked my mother if she still had the recipe. As chance would have it, she did, she knew where it was, and she’d recently made some herself!
The original recipes calls for putting glacé cherries on top of the cookies; that’s a little bit too 70s for me, so I skip them – the result is a delicious, smooth-flavoured, dark, slightly bitter cookie, rolled in oats which gives a very pretty appearance. Of course, the only “down side” is that since they’re really not that sweet at all, you get the impression that you can really eat even more of them than one might with a sweeter cookie, and that’s not really a good thing.
Speaking of gorging on cookies – we went for a walk in a forest recently and were delighted to see that every 100m or so there is an “activity” installed on the path. For example, you’re walking along and there’s a sign with a number (starting at 1, going up to 20 or so). Each sign gives you instructions, so for example it will have you running along a pole to keep your balance, doing some stretching and squats and so forth. The exercises get progressively more difficult, culminating in a battery of pull-ups, leg-lifts and hurdles. My wife and I are determined to try and undertake this “assault course” as often as we can, and perhaps in a few months I might finally be able to do a pull-up or five (I don’t lack upper body strength – those of you who’ve seen me will attest to that, but damn those are HARD!).
This will be the last cake or cookie I post for a while as well – I took a look at the front page of my site and was shocked to see that it seemed to be turning into some sort of baking paradise. Cakes, breads, cookies all over the place, so I think next time I’ll be doing something a little more… savoury. I’ll be back in a few days with the next instalment in my guide on improving website performance. Until then – have a nice week everyone!
Dark Chocolate, Oat-Rolled Cookies
Ingredients
- 100g Butter, softened
- 50g Caster Sugar
- 2tsps Golden Syrup
- 100g Plain Flour
- 25g good quality Cocoa Powder
- ~50g Oats
Instructions
- Start off by preheating your oven to 190 degrees Celsius, and then cream together the butter and sugar in a large bowl until pale and fluffy. Add in the Golden Syrup and beat together well before adding the flour and cocoa powder to the bowl and mixing until you have a smooth paste.
- Place the oats in a shallow dish and then divide the cookie dough into about 12 pieces. Roll into balls and then roll in the oats before placing onto a greased baking sheet. Flatten the balls gently with a fork.
- Place the baking sheet into the preheated oven and bake for 15 minutes, by which time the cookies should have spread out and cracked slightly on top. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to allow to finish cooling. Enjoy!
The final roll in oats before baking make these cookies look pretty dramatic. They look easy to make and delicious too. 🙂
Thanks A_ – they’re very simple to make, very quick, and taste really good. Not too sweet, which makes them nice for times when you feel a bit fed up with sugar!
These cookies are so PRETTY with their final coating of oats. I could see where this would be an all time favorite cookie…I love chocolate and oats together. 🙂
Thank you Betsy :), the oats are a nice touch aren’t they? It wouldn’t be the same at all if they were just mixed in!
Such cute looking cookies….I love the story about the paper clipping…so nostalgic 🙂 There is something to be said about the paper clipping recipes…they were always spot on.
Hi Minnie, absolutely – these days there’s so many recipes flying around but in those days many people… mainly women I suppose… avidly read these magazines and many of them would make the published recipes, so they really had to be sure they were spot on!
I don’t think anyone will complain about your cake paradise when you have a nice cookie like this.
Haha, well perhaps none of my readers, but my wife was telling me to start posting more savoury things, so I suppose I should to make her happy 🙂
so gorgeous in the color with the speckles of oats throughout! This is one cookie I could easily devour quickly! I need about a dozen please! LOL!
If you get a chance please come by and enter my giveaway! I really want to help get this company as many likes on facebook as possible!
Thank you KB 🙂
No cookie for a while! I am really enjoying all your baking posts (still planning on making your oatmeal cookies ASAP)
These dark chocolate cookie look so elegant and that clipping reminds me of my mum’s recipe book, it is full of clippings just like this one!
Hi Sawsan, do you know if you can get Golden Syrup in Jordan? I don’t really see it outside England (sometimes in the international section of big food stores) but I think it’s quite an important addition. When I make cookies without this syrup they fail… maybe molasses/treacle would work instead if you can get that?
But I like glace cherries! Am I in a time-warp? I suppose I do still like ABBA music. I love the old recipe clipping. My mother used to do the exact same thing (the newspaper being the only way to get hard-copy information back then). She would stash them in folders in the bottom drawer in the kitchen and although it looked like there was no system, she seemed to know where each recipe was. I think when we moved house she got rid of all those recipes. Such a shame. Looking forward to seeing what you come up in your savoury repertoire xx
Hi Charlie – no, no – glacé cherries are ok, but putting them on top of the individual cookies like this seemed a little “passé” for me. I must admit that I’ve gone off glacé cherries recently too though… they just seem to taste of nothing but sugar. I got some candied morello cherries a while back in France and they were incredible. A rich cherry flavour… that’s what I want in my baking from now on I think!
Charles, at first I was expecting the opposite, i.e. oat cookies covered in chocolate (ok, I didn’t read the title attentively…) but they are so much more surprising this way! And actually look cuter. I love sweets with oats and if it wasn’t for tummy problems (same I have with what most people now seem to call “healthy bread” which is actually not so healthy for everyone 😉 ), I would probably bake 99% of my cookies with oats. Moreover, I love the recipe history. I still remember when I was a teenager and my mum would cook from newspaper recipes… every single recipe worked (not that we liked all of them). Nowadays even expensive, serious looking cookery books are full of untested stuff that doesn’t work. This is maybe why I treat well-written, tested cookery books as real treasures.
You know, actually I could bake these today, hoping my husband would save me from eating the majority… I have everything (I would just have to substitute golden syrup with molasses…). Are they dry or slightly soft/chewy?
PS Your blog is like a baking paradise 😉 but I see no problem in that!
Oh, you have problems with oats? That’s too bad… I never knew. I love oats, but I’m starting to get really tired with porridge. If I never see another bowl of porridge again in my life I’ll be a happy man :p. I love to make oat cakes (Scottish style ones) – I posted about them a long time ago here but it was in the days when I had almost no readers. A shame because they’re insanely delicious (if you can handle oats) and much better than store-bought ones!
The cookies are dry – definitely not chewy. Actually, the thing that immediately came to mind when I ate them again was that they remind me of chocolate “palets bretonnes”. I think you said you don’t like them (I do though!), so I hope it means you won’t dislike these 🙂
Well, minor problems and only if I eat several cookies… I don’t get spots or need an ambulance, so I don’t let this small inconvenience spoil my taste pleasure 😉 and make ANZAC biscuits regularly. I’m not one of these people who will stop eating delightful food just because it not very well digested…
I do prefer standard palets bretons maybe because the taste of salted butter is much stronger than in chocolate palets where it’s barely noticeable. In general I prefer everything in the chocolate version though.
Your Scottish biscuits look great! I must prepare them and you must repost them one day. It’s a pity they are not more popular. As for the French and oats… every nation has some food dislikes and oats are one of these things most French people don’t like (though ANZAC biscuits I took for a car trip once were devoured by two people from my French family!).
I love oat cookies, especially when chocolate is involved. And you know I’d never complain about a “baking paradise”! 😉
Hi Laura – well, your blog is the very epitome of a baking paradise, so I guess you might be the wrong person to ask if you think I’m making too many cakes, haha! 🙂
Pull-ups are crazy hard!! I can do 30 ‘man’ push-ups 😉 but pull-ups? Maybe 2 on a good day. I like the sense of satisfaction that comes from working at these things though; you’re right, you just get better/stronger.
How cool that your mom still had the original magazine clipping for this recipe Charles… do you know what year it was published? I just shared an excerpt from a 1943 cookbook with my son for a school project — my mom passed the cookbook on to me as a gift several years back. It remains one of my most treasured items. Just love that kind of stuff. This sounds like my kind of cookie recipe too! Not too sweet – lovely and the final dusting of oatmeal over the chocolate is just gorgeous.
Hi Kelly, they are, aren’t they?! I can lift a *lot* of weight… I mean, I could carry a washing machine down the stairs if I needed to but damn I can’t even do one pull up properly. Well, maybe one and then my muscles freak out and start shaking :p. Push-ups aren’t much easier for me… I can do “girl” push-ups until the cows come home, but “man” push-ups… yikes, maybe 10 if I really “push” it (har har).
As for the recipe – I was going to say maybe late 60s, but then I decided to be more “forensic”. You see in the recipe that they give a “cost”? Well, since it’s “55p” I know that it’s definitely later than 1971, since that’s when the decimal currency system came out. So yeah – it’s not quite as historic as your wartime recipe alas, but pretty good nevertheless 🙂
What a great cookie! The oats adds so much to them in looks, flavor and texture. Thanks for sharing this!
Thanks MJ – I do recommend them if you ever feel like baking up some cookies 🙂
We have those activities along our paths too, good for you for challenging yourselves; some of the most difficult exercises are those using your own body as the counter-weight. There is one we have at the club that you either pull or push against your body weight while you are angled about 45 degrees from the ground–it’s brutal. I haven’t been able to do a pull up because of a shoulder injury but maybe I’ll try it again, thanks for the inspiration.
Those cookies look like something I would enjoy, with its intense chocolate flavour. I also like the oats that they are rolled in, it makes a very pretty cookie.
Oh, it reminds me of the last exercise on the circuit near me – they have 3 things which look like medieval torture racks. They’re different sizes so you can be sure to find one to suit you. You slide onto this platform, belly down, and tuck your legs under a wooden bar. You move yourself forward so your upper body is completely off the edge of the platform and then you’re supposed to let yourself down and lift yourself up… a bit like an upside down sit-up – that is harsh, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, when you’re done, you somehow have to extricate yourself from this “rack” without falling face-first into the mud :p
These look so yummy and I like the idea of less sugar, it would be very helpful with my little ones who are sugar and chocolate addict like their mom. Thanks for sharing this delicious one.
Thanks Amira – they’re very good… people often eat too much sugar and these are really good when you feel like something sweet, but don’t want another overload!
Glacé cherries (in the US, maraschino cherries) are just cute little balls of chemicals! I’m “off them” as well. I love that these are not overly sweet (I make everything with less sugar) and that the recipe just makes 12. Don’t know why, but I always seem to think I have to make several dozen.
Hi Jean, I found some candied morello cherries recently… they were incredible. They had such a delicious cherry flavour (a real cherry flavour – not just “sugar”).
I know what you mean – 12 is quite a low yield. I actually doubled the recipe when I made them again because otherwise they just vanish in no time at all!
Happy Father’s Day Charles!!! Dark and rich and beautiful cookies. I see only one big problem with this recipe…it makes only 12 cookies! Most certainly need to quadruple the recipe if teenagers in the home. Have a super day! BAM
Thanks Bam! Oh yes – I doubled the recipe last time and even then it didn’t last long, lol! 🙂
That looks great!
Good food for those who needs some chocolate fix
Thanks Raymund – great with a cup of tea, that’s for sure!
Now I’ve always been iffy about oat cookies – I don’t know why (maybe because oats are meant to be healthy, and cookies not). But I think I could def. give this a go… I actually like the idea! Thanks for the inspiration 🙂
Hi Fati, you don’t really notice the oats on top actually, so no worries at all 🙂
Chocolate and oats is a great match and these look scrumptious! The walking path with the activities sounds very fun and I like how creative it is! We should have those in all the hiking trails around my area. I definitely need extra motivation to lose some weights… 😉
Hi Nami, we must head out to the walking trail again soon. We went and worked out there one time and then I got a horrible cold. Finally it’s gone so back to the weight-loss and exercise, hooray!
These look utterly delicious Charles – even with the chocolate. They remind me of a baked version of my no bake cookies. I love that you and your mom thought of the cookies roughly around the same time. How’s that for kismet. Good luck on the assault course! They have those various places around here that I’ve seen. The kids and I had fun doing one once a few years ago. Good luck with the pull-ups. I can almost manage one now. Almost. 😉
Hehe, I had a horrible cold recently so we didn’t go back since the first time we did the full circuit but will be planning on returning soon – maybe on Monday! Screw pull-ups though… I don’t understand how they can be so hard 🙁
Charles,
Mom’s cookies are always the best, but these are so very pretty!! Love the oats (polka-dots) on the glorious chocolate colored treats—what decadent childhood snacks!
Thanks Malli – it’s always a nice memory isn’t it? Big plates of cookies baked up by mom! 🙂
Gorgeous looking cookies. Spotted with oats like that, they look lovely! I am very interested to try them as they don’t have alot of sugar. I don’t have a big sweet tooth so I think these would be great for me.
Our local forest walk also has activities along the route! Can’t say I have been brave enough to actually follow them though! But perhaps I will give it a go when the kids are old enough to carry me for the last bit when I collapse! x
LOL :D. It’s good Anneli – you should give it a try, although I prefer to go at times when there aren’t too many other people around… I feel self-conscious enough without some über-fit French people running around doing 50 pull-ups without evening breaking a sweat :p
I’m still under the weather and cancelled our reservation for Valentine’s dinner, rats! But I know my husband will make this for me coz he feel really bad. I checked the cupboard and he has everything he needs to make this cookie.
I have same method as your mother for recipe filling system.
Happy Valentin’s Day!