Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are chewy and soft, not crisp and sandy.

With the added addition of maple, these healthy peanut butter cookies are so good, no one will even detect the added benefits of oatmeal and maple!

I love cookies. In fact I favor cookies over most any sweet, except for maybe cake. But I always default to cookies because cookies are just right for any occasion or even none at all. I love shortbread cookies and chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cookies. And all the others I didn’t mention!  For many years I used to make my cookies with a hand held mixer until one day this golden plastic beauty just conked out on me. It was then I remembered that I had a KitchenAid mixer that I’d moved from home to home for 15 years after becoming its honorary owner soon after my Grandma Fanny died. That was in 1981, the year I got married, so I am guessing that my KitchenAid mixer is over 40 years old.

No, I can’t remember what I was making the day I pulled her out of retirement. It was probably cookies, but it could have been bread. In any case I remember turning her on and the dust flew. Like it flew everywhere. She’d never been covered; just left sitting on her lonesome in our dirty garage, surrounded by dead moths. If I’d ever taken the time to think about her I would have felt mighty sad that this perfectly good mixer was just needing a home. After finding out that all her working parts were in order she entered into my service, and it is then that I named her Fanny.

It’s kind of funny but when ever I think about my Grandma Fanny I am reminded of the one word that everyone used to describe her. That word was, “workhorse.” It was a compliment. I guess my grandma who by profession was a registered dietician, and then gave that up to help my grandfather run a frozen food business, was a workaholic.  She worked hard, my grandma, but I am told that Sunday was her day to bake. She was known for her cinnamon rolls and what else I’m not really sure. The truth is I don’t ever remember her cooking for me. I know she cooked because I inherited her collection of cookbooks and I still use them to this day. My favorite part about browsing her cookbooks is when I come across her penciled handwritten notes on a particular recipe about changes she made, and if the recipe was good or not. It makes me feel like my grandma is standing right next to me.

So Fanny, my Kitchen Aid mixer, is kind of important to me. She now resides in my home, next to the dryer. She is missing one piece of her whipping attachment that just came loose but still whips pretty well without it. She’s managed to survive a major accident while kneading babka dough and is a bit chipped because of it, but it’s my tile floor that never recovered. The floor still has broken chips of tile missing from when Fanny flew off the counter and landed sideways on it…still spinning. The babka dough was fine. Fanny was fine. My kitchen floor…not so fine.

Every time I think about getting a new gorgeous Kitchen Aid mixer, I remind myself that Fanny is with me. She is a workhorse in my kitchen. She never complains. She always lands on her feet. She is a part of me and I’m not putting her out to pasture just yet. It’s Fanny that I turn to when I bake bread. It’s Fanny I turn to when I bake birthday cakes. And it’s Fanny that beats my butter and helps me bake perfect cookies like these peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip delights. You might say it’s Fanny that has made me fat, but I tell myself that that’s just my Grandma Fanny’s way of showering love from above.

A Few More Great Cookies:

The easiest and best chocolate chip cookie!

Alton Brown’s Chocolate Chip Cookie

Chocolate Cherry Chocolate Crumb Cookies

 

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