Oatmeal Cherry Cookies are flat out inedible

Erin Mann is baking a new cake every week for a year from the "All Cakes Considered" cookbook and shares her adventures here on AnnArbor.com. Read past columns here.

Oatmeal Cherry Cookies spread out like pancakes while baking.

Erin Mann | Contributor

So far, the break from cake has been a success: the Cowboy Cookies and Peanut Butter Fingers were both tasty departures from the many cakes that came before them. I expected “All Cakes Considered” to deliver once again with this week’s Oatmeal Cherry Cookies.

An oatmeal cookie with dried cherries and butterscotch chips sounded like a winner to me.

The original recipe is from Sheila Lukin's "USA Cookbook," and is a favorite of Melissa Gray’s family. Sheila Lukins was a cookbook author and food writer; most well-known for co-authoring The Silver Palate cookbook series and her weekly column in Parade magazine. Coincidentally, I baked these cookies on the one year anniversary of her passing.

I recently moved into a beautiful home on the north side of town. These cookies would be the first goodies baked in my new kitchen. I tested the oven with my oven thermometer and revealed a temperature difference of about 10 degrees. The other nice thing about my new-to-me oven is that is has a light so I can see what’s going inside without opening the door.

The recipe was just like any other cookie recipe except that it called for 1/4 cup of milk which was to be added after the eggs were mixed in. This was something different that I hadn’t seen in other cookie recipes. After some searching on the Internet, it appears it’s not that unusual at all.

I underestimated the amount of oatmeal I had on-hand and came up 1/2 cup short. I made do with the 2 cups I had and thought it wouldn’t be too big a deal because I’d also be mixing in 1/2 cup dried cherries and 1/2 cup butterscotch chips.

After mixing, something seemed “off” about the dough. It was definitely softer than other cookie doughs. I dropped nine evenly-spaced spoonfuls onto a parchment-covered cookie sheet.

These cookies fell victim to the dreaded spread during baking. Like little pancakes, they flattened out on the cookie sheet running into one another making it difficult to tell where one cookie ended and the other began.

I placed the bowl of dough in the fridge when I wasn’t using it to prep a new pan of cookies. This didn’t seem to help much.

What caused my baking blunder? A little Googling marked the butter or the baking soda as possible culprits.

I took a bite of one of the cooled cookies and immediately deemed it inedible. The cookie looked greasy. It was neither crispy nor chewy, and sort of fell apart in my hands. The whole batch went into the trash faster than you can say "Jack Robinson." The inviting tartness of dried cherries and delectable sweetness of butterscotch chips could not save the fate of this poor cookie.

A cookie is a terrible thing to waste. Consider yourself a cookie-baking expert? Send you tips my way!

Erin Mann is ruining diets one baked good at a time with her weekly baking adventures.
Email her at SheGotTheBeat@gmail.com to offer your baking wisdom or follow her on Twitter. Facebook users can also keep up-to-date with A CAKE A WEEK by joining the group.