Recipe - Oatmeal and Walnut Cookies - Guest Post

[Editor's Note: In my search for yummy and healthy recipes, I discovered that one of my blogger friends Simran is also into the same quest as me - a healthier lifestyle yet not compromising on taste. So sure enough, I had to ask her to do a guest post on this blog with her tips / suggestions / recipes etc. 

Today, I am happy to introduce you to Simran who is an engineer by degree, has worked in the IT industry and as a curator for an online marketplace. She is a book lover, an amateur photographer, a mother, a closet feminist, a blogger and a wannabe traveler. She blogs with gusto at Simz Corner.  

So without further adieu, here is her post on a healthy recipe for oatmeal and walnut cookies.] 

I had been looking for a basic cookie recipe for a long time - the kind that you can tweak and add/modify. I got one from a friend recently and I tweaked it to add some of my own variants.

Pic courtesy Flickr Creative Commons License from here

Here is the most basic recipe -

1/2 cup butter

1 1/4 cup flour

3/4 cup sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1 egg - you can make it eggless by adding some extra butter instead of the egg

1 tsp vanilla essence

Method:

1. Preheat the oven at 180C for 15 minutes
2. Melt butter and add the sugar to it. Whisk it with a hand whisk or an electric mixer
3. Add the egg (if you are using it), followed by flour and baking powder. Mix it well with the whisk or a spatula
4. Add the vanilla essence and mix
5. Put a spoonful of batter spaced apart on a baking tray. The tray should be covered in baking paper or aluminium foil or greased with a lite butter spray.
6. Bake in the oven for about 15 to 20 mins or till you see the crust golden brown at the edges. The centre might feel soft to touch, but when you let the cookie rest out of the oven for some time, it will firm up. 

Now the question was, how could I make this healthy with all the butter, sugar and flour! We all do need comfort food and something to satisfy that sweet tooth once in a while. I believe moderation is the key and excess/extreme of anything is bad. 

This is what I did to make it less-unhealthy ;)

• I use un-bleached or whole wheat flour - makes stuff taste better!
• Sugar - I use brown sugar or palm sugar - it gives them the nice brown colour - I love that. If you like the whiter/golden brown version you can use regular white sugar. Castor/powder sugar is better if you are using a hand whisk - it will mix easily with the butter.
• I added some rolled oats - about 1/4 cup and reduced flour by that much.
• I added a handful of roughly chopped/crushed walnuts (before the vanilla essence) to up the protein and fatty acid quotient.
• I also added some milk - 2 table spoons because the mixture seemed dense - what that did is made the cookies spread out laterally when I baked them so space them out further on the baking tray if you add milk.

The cookies turned out great - crisp, buttery, oats and walnuts bringing in that extra crunch that I love!! Unfortunately I couldn't take any pictures during and after the process - thanks to a handful pre-schooler, hence the pic from Flickr. Will update the post with my pics, the next time I bake them.

Enjoy baking and do lemme know if you have any questions :)