honey-nut oatmeal cookies

This recipe really caught my eye – chewy oatmeal, honey roasted peanuts, and honey. Doesn’t that sound delicious? Oatmeal cookies are always a big hit at my office, and so are peanut butter cookies. Combine the two, and we’re already bound to have a winner. But the addition of all that honey flavour, and the twist of using honey roasted peanuts instead of just plain peanuts, boosted this already good cookie to another level. 

If you read last week’s post, you know that I had some problems with the ingredients for this recipe. I couldn’t find Planter’s honey roasted peanuts anywhere – which is unfortunate, because I could happily eat a jar of those all by myself (delicious sweet & salty goodness!). All the stores around here seem to have their own in-store brands these days. Have you noticed that too? Normally that’s fine – I buy the store brand nuts all the time. But trust me, when it comes to honey roasted peanuts? Keep looking. I bought the store brand, and as I was getting ready to bake these last week, I opened the bag of nuts and popped a couple in my mouth. And promptly popped them right back out again. So gross. I don’t like wasting food, but I ended up throwing these away. I don’t know what was wrong with them, but they tasted like neither honey nor peanuts.

So last week I made some amazing Coconut, Cranberry, Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies instead (omg they were so good!) and I kept looking for honey roasted peanuts in the meantime. I still couldn’t find any Planter’s, but I did find a comparable brand. They’re not quite as good (that’s probably for the best, because I would totally eat them all otherwise), but they at least tasted like honey roasted peanuts. Good enough to bake with, for sure. Remember, your ingredients should taste good on their own, because that’s where the flavour of the end product comes from.

The dough for this cookie was really soft and sticky, and after working the chopped peanuts in with my hands, my hands were so soft from all the honey in there (check out how awesome honey is for your skin!). And after baking, the cookies remained really soft and moist – again, from all the honey in there. They definitely taste of honey, and slightly of peanuts too, with a great chewy oatmeal cookie texture.

I have another recipe bookmarked for honey roasted peanut butter cookies. I may be trying that one soon, since I still have quite a few nuts leftover! Although as we’re heading into hotter summer weather, it may get bumped until things cool off a bit.