I’m a sucker for Valentine’s Day. Yes, I know it’s just some holiday someone made up and now it’s more about buying candy and flowers and making reservations at a fancy restaurant. For me it’s more than just the commercial aspect of it.
At the base level, I love hearts and the color red, so seeing that everywhere makes me so happy. At the deeper level, I just love any reason to tell people how much I love them, especially N.
My default way of showing my love is through food, which, if you’ve been reading here for a while you’ll know. In all my years of making people gifts, nothing makes a person light up like receiving homemade cookies. It brings all of us back to a wonderful place somewhere in our childhood when a good time was had with a great cookie.
My Whole Wheat Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies are perfect to share with my loved ones on Valentines. The pop of red from the cranberry reminds me of my favorite color and gives the cookie a nice sweetness. The addition of whole wheat flour and oatmeal gives this cookie some added fiber and is slightly cleaner than a regular AP flour cookie.
I use the base of this cookie recipe (without the oatmeal and cranberry) for all whole wheat cookies I bake, so if you want to make cookies with different flavors, you can easily adapt this recipe to make whatever cookie you want.
The quantities for the recipe yield A LOT of cookies, about 4-5 dozen 2 to 2.5″ inch cookies. I’m usually making cookies for a lot of people, so I double and triple cookie recipes I adapt. If you’re not making cookies for a lot of people, half this recipe OR, what I do, give the extra dozens you don’t want for yourself to others 🙂
Ingredients
- 3 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- 8 oz (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cold, cut into small pieces
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup coconut sugar (regular sugar works fine as well)
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup old fashioned oats
- 1/4 cup dried cranberries
Instructions
Preheat oven to 350.
In one bowl, mix dry ingredients together: flour, baking powder, baking soda, and spices.
In a larger mixing bowl, combine sugars and butter and cream with a mixer. Add eggs, one at a time, followed by the vanilla.
On a low speed, slowly add in dry mixture into wet until flour is combined. This mixture is crumbly. As long as you can roll it into a ball, you're good. With a spoon, stir in oatmeal and cranberries, adding any more to your preference.
On parchment-lined baking sheets, drop mounds of dough with a spring-loaded ice-cream scoop, leaving space around the cookies to spread. Bake for 16-20 minutes or until golden brown. Allow cookies to cool for 5 minutes until moving. Repeat until all cookies are baked.