Apron Free Cooking ~ Chocolate No Bake Cookies

By Noel Lizotte

I’m work­ing on bak­ing this month. Christ­mas for sev­eral of my fam­ily mem­bers is going to equal cookie plates. They have told me already how much they are look­ing for­ward to the cookies.

I’m adding one cookie that doesn’t require any bak­ing. These choco­late cook­ies are always pop­u­lar at potlucks and cookie exchanges! I always get com­ments, “I love these!” “These are my favorites!” but peo­ple don’t gen­er­ally make these cook­ies for them­selves. I’m not sure why that is.

Using sim­ple pantry ingre­di­ents, and a quick stove top boil, these cook­ies biggest effort is the wait­ing for them to cool. We usu­ally end up with a burnt tongue or two since we’re not patient enough to let them com­pletely cool before dig­ging in!

Choco­late No Bake Cookies

3 cups oats

½ cup cocoa

½ pound butter

½ cup peanut butter

2 cups sugar

½ cup milk

2 tea­spoon vanilla

Place sugar, cocoa, but­ter and milk in heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil. Add vanilla, peanut but­ter and stir until mixed. Add oats and mix to coat. Drop by spoon­fuls onto waxed paper. Allow to cool.

Approx­i­mate Nutri­tional Infor­ma­tion: Serv­ings Per Recipe:36, Amount Per Serv­ing: Calories:139, Total Fat: 7g, Cho­les­terol: 6mg, Sodium: 20mg, Total Carbs: 17g, Pro­tein: 2g.

Make It A Meal: Serve with milk for an after­noon snack. These are cook­ies. They’re not really intended to be a meal, no mat­ter how hard you try.

Vari­a­tions: replace the dark cocoa with milk choco­late for a lighter fla­vor. Leave out the cocoa and make peanut but­ter cookies.

I try to make this recipe sev­eral times a year. My fam­ily enjoys nib­bling on the oat­meal cook­ies for break­fast when they’re in a hurry to get out the door. I know the cook­ies are not as nutri­tious as a “real” break­fast, but have to admit they’re bet­ter than nothing!

One tip I’ve learned, it’s best to fol­low the recipe instruc­tion to drop by tea­spoon­fuls onto waxed paper to cool. I’ve tried to short cut by scrap­ing all the cookie mix­ture into a 9x13 pan and cut­ting into squares later. The squares end up crumbly and a mess all over. The spoon drops seem to cool nicely and are able to be eaten neatly.

In fact, I’ve got­ten so that I drop only about half a tea­spoon at a time on the waxed paper. I’ve found the bite sized pieces are eas­ier for folks to eat when they can pop an entire cookie in their mouth at one time. This will make a dif­fer­ence on the num­ber of cook­ies you end up with, also. Smaller cook­ies yield a larger quan­tity. The good news about that, smaller cook­ies have fewer calories!

If you have a sea­sonal potluck or cookie exchange com­ing up, why not give these cook­ies a try? You’ll be the hit of the party, I promise. Or, at least your cook­ies will be.

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! This recipe is sim­i­lar to ones printed in her cook­book Apron Free Cook­ing which is avail­able on the web­site www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinarychat.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Dec 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.