Divine No Bakes...

[merlicky]

No bakes are one of my favorite type of cookies – especially the chocolate oatmeal variety – so of course I decided to mess with the recipe and try to improve it. They typically use milk fats along with cocoa powder to create a sort of chocolate, I wanted to try using higher end chocolates – cocoa butter and all – instead. However, I could not find a single recipe that did this, so I went to the kitchen.

The first thing I found out is that you can’t cook the sugar as long or you end up with a dry, crumbly cookie. Honestly, most of the proportions were different from my standard recipe. It took a few tries to get the texture right, and a few more experimenting with different chocolates (various E. Guittard, Callebaut, Scharffen Berger, Michel Cluizel, and Valrhona chocolates). I ended up finding the Valrhona Le Noir Extra Amer 85% makes the best cookie (despite this chocolate getting poor reviews, it works exceptionally well in this application).

So, if anyone is interested, here are the results of my experimentation…

(makes 40 cookies)

Ingredients:

7oz Valrhona Le Noir Extra Amer 85%

5oz Creamy Peanut Butter

2 cups Quick Oats

1 2/3 cups Sugar

3/8 cups Whole Milk

1 tbls Butter

1 tsp Imitation Vanilla (for whatever reason I found this to work better than the extract)

Directions:

-Melt and temper chocolate (even though the chocolate probably comes out of temper later, I found that the cookies turned out better if I did this – don’t know why).

-Mix in peanut butter until smooth.

-Mix in oats.

-Melt butter in pan and add milk and sugar. Stir until combined.

-Heat sugar mixture on medium to 220º-222º (using an infrared thermometer I heat the sugar until the surface area is covered with bubbles and reads 220º-222º all over). As the sugar is cooking heat the chocolate mixture back up in the microwave for about 7 seconds on high – to around 97º (again, don’t really know why this works, but it seems to help).

-Remove sugar mixture from heat and add vanilla.

-Pour sugar mixture over chocolate mixture and stir until consistent texture.

-Spoon onto cookie sheet and let cool.

[Lisa Shock]

This sounds like an interesting project.

I'd like to suggest Old Fashioned oats, I like the texture better. Of course, I usually use crunchy peanut butter so that the final cookie has nut chunks in it, as well...