Yeehaw! for Cowboy Cookies!

I reckon cookie baking is in my bones.

I started working in the kitchen to master our family fudge recipe when both my oldest brother and two sisters had gone to college. Remaining sibs were unlikely to don the chef’s toque, so I tackled the treat.

But I really cut my culinary teeth on Christmas cookies, a cornucopia of confections in a house of limited sweets much of the year.

Mom kept the canisters atop kitchen cabinets, but I learned to scale chairs and counter tops, snacking on chocolate chip, molasses-coconut, “ice box”, kolachi (“little nut-rolls”), filbert crescents (actually walnut), Christmas cut-outs, peanut butter, and my preferred oatmeal cookies. The variety expanded as we kids tried new recipes.

When it came my turn to first help “bake all the Christmas Cookies,” I learned how daunting the effort was. No exaggeration: Jay once counted the Xmas excesses we baked in a single season, and the sum hovered around 100 dozen. (An engineer quantifying? Go figure).

We didn’t just bake for a family of nine kids and two parents. We baked for numerous visitors each Christmas/New Year’s season. And mom didn’t just present a plate with coffee, she packed take out.

So, yeah, home-made cookies are baked into my essence. Yet I rarely made them in the last 20 years.

Jay methodically reduced recipes annually to match dwindling visitors, to the point he bakes almost everything in a day or two. A niece amply overstocks us by baking cookies and bringing a bushel to the homestead — carrying coals to Newcastle, as it were. Thanks, Erin!

So I don’t look for cookie recipes. Yet when I saw an episode of Cook’s Country featuring “Cowboy Cookies,” taste buds tingled.

The TV chefs credited the inspiration to a quadrennial Family Circle Magazine contest of favorite recipes from presidential candidates. This confection won for Laura Bush in 2000, beating Tipper Gore’s ginger snaps “by a landslide.”

I decided to bake them the same day MT opted to try orange donuts with a chocolate glaze. She was thinking Halloween (I plan to counter with “brain cookies” soon).

A few suggestions:

The vegetable oil spray in a 1/4 cup measuring vessel lasted no more than eight cookies before dough stuck. I had to clean the cup and re-spray it twice.

Oven nuance matters. Our antique electric oven increasingly seems to burn hot, and I’ll almost certainly start reducing the recommended temp by 25°. Also, I use insulated cookie sheets, a big help in reducing burnt bottoms, but I suspect non-insulated would have been better in this case. Either the hot oven or insulated sheets — or both — made the cookies hardened on the top before they spread as much as they should.

We rarely keep unsalted butter at home, but I may start after this. When MT took donuts and cookies to work for tasting, editor Roger DuPuis noted of the cowboy treat “I like it a lot,” but that it tasted a little salty compared to the donuts.

These have a lot of well-mingled flavors, so people had some fun guessing the ingredients. “They remind me of Seven Layer Bars, except everything is mixed together,” page designer Toni Pennello said. “When the cafeteria at Wilkes used to have them, I would stuff about 10 of them in my bag.”

They are big, as cookies go. “It’s something I’d like to have with coffee after dinner,” reporter Patrick Kernan said. “It’s not something I’d want to binge on. I just want to have one and savor it.”

But newsroom “noob” (relatively speaking) Kevin Carroll put it succinctly.

“I love a good cookie.”

I might try to make this the latest addition to the Guydish Christmas cookie compendium, to see how it goes over. But MT & I agreed: The orange donuts were quite tasty, and this is a good cookie.

“Dobru chut!”

And, to paraphrase that iconic cowboy, John “Duke” Wayne:

Somebody oughta give you a cowboy cookie recipe. But I won’t. I won’t. The hell I won’t!

Cowboy Cookies (Cook’s Country)

Combine and whisk together:1-1/4 cups flour

¾ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt,

whisk together

In a separate bowl, combine and whisk together:

1-1/2 cups light brown sugar

12 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1 large egg and 1 egg yolk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Add flour mix to wet mix. Whisk until just incorporated

To that, add

1-1/4 cups oats

1 cup toasted pecans, chopped

1 cup sweetened shredded coconut

2/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Use rubber spatula to mix together.

Line a rimless baking sheet with parchment. Using ¼ cup measuring cup coated with vegetable oil spray, measure cookies 8 per sheet, 2-1/2 inches apart from each other. Bake one sheet at a time at 350° for 15-17 minutes, rotating sheet half way through

They will be a little pale and puffy in the center, and the edges should just have started to set. Let “carry over cooking” continue for five minutes on the sheet while doing the next sheet of cookies. Then transfer to wire rack to cool.