Angela's Best Cookies

The first recipe I ever felt confident about modifying is this one, and these became my very best cookies. I've baked them for school treats, for lecture series (when my budget didn't reach to snacks), for cross country pasta parties. I've had people ask for them by name. When are you going to make more Angela's Best Cookies?

But of course, I stole them -- or rather tweaked a recipe I found in one of my go to cookbooks, the Frog Commissary Cookbook.

I wasn't in Philadelphia when this place was still retail, but I appreciate their description of these cookies: "We sell this cookie the way McDonald's sells burgers: they fly out the door." What they don't say is that they also made money on these cookies by stretching the dough -- basically we are talking Toll House cookies plus a LOT of oats, so that the recipe makes a LOT of cookies fairly inexpensively. I added dried cranberries to make them even yummier.

It's great to make a whole recipe and then stash half in the freezer for later, but after my teenaged son figured that trick out, it's safer to just make half a recipe at a time: 2 1/2 dozen.

Enjoy!

Angela's Best Cookies

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup brown sugar (or reduce)

1 cup white sugar (ditto)

2 t. vanilla extract

2 eggs

2 cups flour

1 t. salt

1 t. baking soda

1 t. baking powder

2 1/2 c. old-fashioned oats

12 oz semisweet chocolate chips

1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts

3/4 cup dried cranberries

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes. Let sit one minute, then remove to cooling racks.

Before

After