Candy Cookies

The kids are fed and playing, the oldest is off to school, and as I sit here with my morning coffee, I’m refraining myself from having a few of these cookies for breakfast. It is only 8:30 after all and there’s not nearly enough oats in these to consider them breakfast food. I actually call these “Candy Cookies”. You could literally sit down with a plate full of these and not even realise you’ve eaten a dozen. They’re that good.

There are a lot (A LOT) of lace cookie recipes out there on the web and a lot of them are similar but I didn’t get this recipe from the net. I went to this get together once, around Christmas time a few years back, where everyone had to bring a dish and the recipe to share with the other guests. I had never tasted lace cookies before and that was definitely my favorite recipe of the night. It’s not a very complicated recipe, you just have to be a little careful about baking these as the batter spreads while baking and also they burn quite easily. Aside from that, it’s one of the easiest cookie recipes I have and the results are quite spectacular if you consider the little amount of work involved.

I tweaked the original recipe a bit yesterday as I had some oranges lying around and since I made some oatmeal cookies from smitten kitchen during the holidays I’ve been totally addicted to the taste of orange zest in cookies. So I replaced half the oats with ground almonds, added some orange zest to the mix and drizzled the finished cookies with chocolate to end up with THE most addictive cookies I have ever made.

So if you do make these, I hope you have more willpower than I do as I’m off to get a cookie… Happy baking!

Chocolate Drizzled, Orange Lace Cookies
1/2 cup oats
1/2 cup ground almonds
2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup sugar
1 egg, room temperature
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon orange zest

2 oz dark chocolate, chopped
2 oz milk chocolate, chopped

In a small bowl, combine oats, almonds, flour, salt and baking powder; set aside.

In another bowl, mix sugar, egg, butter, vanilla and orange zest. Add dry ingredients and mix well.

Drop teaspoonfuls of dough 2 inches apart on a parchment lined baking sheet (no more than 6 cookies per baking sheet as the cookies spread a lot during baking).

Bake at 350 degrees F for 8-10 minutes or until lightly browned. Let stand 1 minute or until firm then remove to wire racks to cool.

In a double boiler, melt chocolate until smooth. Drizzle chocolate onto cookies while they’re still on wire racks. Let the chocolate set and enjoy!