Peanut Butter-Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’ve seen a lot of oatmeal cookie recipes, and a lot of peanut butter recipes, but not many that combine the two. The taste of these cookies was good. I’ve always liked the combination of chocolate and peanut butter.

I had initial concerns that these peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies would be too many flavors for me, but I was delightfully surprised with the results. I like that the oats made for a less dense peanut butter cookie, and I can’t think of a situation where adding chocolate chips didn’t improve a dessert.

This recipe does call for a large quantity of several ingredients: peanut butter and oats, most notably. Were the M&M’s essential to the recipe? Probably not. I wouldn’t worry if you don’t have M&M’s on-hand and you’d like to try this recipe.

Prepare to delay your gratification, since the dough needs to chill for 5 hours. These cookies are chewy, and continued to stay soft even a day or two after baking.

If you love oatmeal, peanut butter, and chocolate, these cookies are the bomb. This is the best new recipe for cookies that I’ve come across in a long time—and I try lots of cookie recipes.

I refer to them as “healthy” cookies because of the quantity of oatmeal they contain. I substituted Reese’s Pieces for the M&M’s, which gave the cookies a more pronounced peanut butter taste, and they were great. Everyone at my workplace loved them. Next time, I’d store them in a tin to try to keep them crisp. I had only covered them and they softened overnight.

These peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies were fabulous. Everyone who tried them gobbled them up right away. What I especially liked about them is that they weren’t overly sweet—they weren’t very sweet at all, actually.

I was skeptical to make the dough with cold butter (rather than room-temperature butter), but it worked very well. The small amount of flour also made me skeptical, but the dough was the perfect consistency. I liked that these baked into chewy cookies with soft centers; it’s the perfect texture for the medley of peanut butter, oatmeal, and chocolate.

I baked some of the cookies after the 5-hour refrigeration, and I baked some after overnight refrigeration. Both batches were perfect. Also, I divided the dough in two. One had the semisweet chips and M&M’s, as called for; the other had semisweet chips and milk chocolate chips. Both types were a hit.

This recipe for peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies surprised us in many ways. First, we were surprised to see how smoothly the butter creamed while cold. The amount of flour called for was minimal, but the dough was very stiff due to the amount of peanut butter and oats.

We didn’t have regular-size chocolate chips so we used mini semisweet chips. The recipe was easy to mix together, but the cookies took a very long time to bake—because of their size, you could only fit 4 on a cookie sheet at a time. It’s an all-day experience to make these cookies due to the 5-hour chill time, then more than 1 1/2 hours of total baking time. Using the regular ice cream scoop gave me the exact yield stated in the recipe. I would recommend a strong, high-quality ice cream scoop, because the dough is so thick, it will break a weaker scoop (don’t ask).

The raw dough had a strong peanut butter flavor, so we were concerned it would overpower the cookies—but the finished product provided a nice balance between peanut butter and chocolate. The end result is a great-tasting cookie. These cookies are hand-size, and we’re not talking about palms—this includes fingers, too. I can only eat half of a cookie at a time, but the grandkids didn’t have any problems finishing them whole. Making these is a great way to get kids in the kitchen and cooking.