Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

This week my department is holding a fundraising book and bake sale to support our spring conference, and since I can't bear to part with any of my books, I made dozens of cookies instead!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen
Servings size vary - I got 41 small cookies out of this batch

Ingredients:
1 egg
1/2 cup unsalted butter (8 tbsp), softened
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup semi-sweet mini chocolate chips (3/4 cup if you want slightly less chocolaty cookies)

1. Preheat oven to 350F degrees.

2. In a large bowl, cream together the egg, butter, brown sugar, and vanilla. Unless your butter is pretty soft (or you want a great upper body workout), I recommend using an electric beater for this step.

3. Whisk in baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and flour. The original recipe says to combine these in a separate bowl, but I find that it's just as easy to add them to the butter/sugar mix from the start, especially if you have a small kitchen and a limited number of mixing bowls.

4. Stir in the oats and chocolate chips.

5. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge. This step helps to produce a thicker cookie, but if you're in a rush you can skip it and continue baking. Let chill anywhere from 30 min to a few hours (I let mine chill while I went to class).

6. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper and pick your cookie scoop. I find ice cream scoops to work really well in forming consistently sized cookies. I own two sized scoops, the one on the left makes smaller, roughly 2 inch cookies, while the one on the right makes nice large cookies, roughly 3 inches.

7. Scoop cookies roughly 2 inches apart onto the parchment lined baking sheet. After I fill the sheet, I normally return the remaining mix to the fridge to chill before preparing the next batch.

8. Bake for 10-12 minutes for larger cookies, or if doing smaller ones as I did, 5-8 minutes. Remove cookies when the edges are golden but still look undercooked on top.

9. Let the cookies stay on the hot baking sheet for roughly 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

10. Enjoy!

Nutritional Info per Cookie:
Calories 79; Total Fat 4g; Cholesterol 11mg; Sodium 32mg; Total Carbs 10g; Protein 1g