SALTED MAPLE, GINGER & CRANBERRY OATMEAL COOKIES

These are not cookies you leave out for Santa. He will not appreciate them.

To be honest, I don’t have kids so I wouldn’t know, but I can’t imagine they would appreciate them either.

I love oatmeal cookies, not just because it uses up porridge oats that for some reason, I tend to have sack-quantities of in my house at all times, but because they have this amazing, soft yet crumbly texture that you just don’t get with an average flour cookie. It’s almost like a flapjack, but a very proud and boastful one.

That’s not slagging off cookies, in fact I have an incredible recipe for Chocolate & Pistachio Rye Cookies in my book Get Stuffed that I also intend to whap out this year (still none for the kids though) but I feel these oatmeal cookies, have to take pride of place in my culinary calendar this year.

They are the kind of cookies that have a tonne of personalities coming at you all at once.

They’re soft-bellied and spicy from the nuggets of sugar crystallised ginger, smoky and salty from the streaks of salted maple, and sour and moreish from the sharp bursts of cranberry.

Yeah kids will hate them. Good. More for us.

Give them a Freddo or something.

Makes roughly 12 – 15 cookies

130g jumbo oats

180g plain flour

¼ tsp bicarb soda

½ tsp ginger

130g unsalted butter

100g soft brown sugar

¼ cup maple syrup

1 tsp vanilla

1 egg

50g crystallised ginger

150g dried cranberries

Sea salt for sprinkling

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and line an oven tray with baking paper.
2. In a bowl, fork together the oats, flour, bicarb, and ginger with a pinch of salt until thoroughly combined.
3. In a separate bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, and maple syrup – and do this for roughly 5 or 10 minutes until you have a golden-brown mix.
4. To this bowl, add the vanilla and egg, and beat into the butter mix.
5. On a chopping board and using a knife, cut the crystallised ginger into small chunks roughly the size of the cranberries, and then tumble both the ginger and cranberries into the bowl of dry ingredients.
6. Add the butter mix into the dry ingredients in instalments, mixing gently but firmly in between each instalment until you have used up all of the dry and you have a firm but tender dough.
7. Take tablespoon sized pieces of the dough and using the palms of your hands, roll the piece of dough into a small ball the size of a golf ball. Place the ball on the lined oven tray and gently press down on it to flatten it just ever so slightly, just so that it’s not a perfectly round ball, but still domed in shape. You can get about 12 – 15 balls out of these measurements, depending on how generous your tablespoons are, so you could just do a batch of 6 – 8 on one tray and after they’re baked, bake the rest, or you can spread the dough balls across two lined oven trays and bake all at once.
8. Once your dough balls are on the oven tray(s) and domed, sprinkle over a little sea salt on top of each one.
9. Slip in the preheated oven for 15 minutes, in which time they will have spread slightly and turned a golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to sit on the oven tray for about 5 minutes to cool and firm up, and then you can remove them to a wire rack to cool further before serving.