Guest post: Breakfast cookies

(hi, this is jennyalice with a sneaky little guest post.)

My son eats a lot of food. No really, a lot of food, and since he has a physical disability, he needs quite a bit of help at meal time. Breakfast is always a blur at our house, and in an effort to be most efficient, get out of the house on time, and offer Jack more opportunity for independence, we have tried every cereal on the market. They all end up in little pieces at the bottom of the box, or scattered all over the floor. So we want him to be able to feed himself, and it has to be fast, and his sister has to like it. Frustrated by the $4.00 price tag on 5 ounces of granola nuggets, I decided to try to make cereal cookies. This is my first try. It is basically a takeoff on any oatmeal cookie recipe, with cereal instead of the oatmeal.

I use a professional grade KitchenAid stand mixer and aluminum jelly roll (cookie) pans in a non-convection electric oven.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs (I used large, not extra large)
• 2 sticks of softened butter (I do not ever bake with margarine)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2T vanilla extract
• 1 cup white flour
• 2/3 cup wheat flour
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1 15 oz box muesli cereal (I used Safeway brand)
• 1/4-1/2 cup oatmeal (as much as needed to make the batter more on the stiff side.)

Directions

1. Pre-heat oven to 350F
   
2. Cream butter and sugars
3. Add vanilla
4. Add eggs one at a time, beat until smooth
5. If you are a good person you will sift your flours, baking soda and baking powder. But since you are not a superhuman, just try not to have any hard nuggets of baking soda or baking powder, then with the mixer on a low to medium speed, slowly add the flours, baking soda, and baking powder.
6. Mix in the box of muesli. You could hand mix at this point, but I have a heavy duty stand mixer, so I make it do the work.
7. Add in the oatmeal a little at a time until the cookie dough is more on the stiff side.

I use cookie sheets with parchment paper to cook most all of my baked goods. It allows me to place all of the batter onto the sheets, then I can slip baked goods onto the counter and a new sheet with raw dough onto the pan and pop it back into the oven faster. No lag time between baking and I don't need to get my hands dirty very 13 minutes.

I tested three different sizes for the cookies. A 1 tablespoon dough ball makes a normal-size cookie, and was more on the soft side. A 1/2 tablespoon dough ball, made a small cookie, and would probably work just fine for most people, but I really wanted them to be "one bite" cookies so there would be less of a chance of my kid taking a bite then dropping the rest. I settled on a fat 1 1/2 tsp. So I just scooped up batter 1 tablespoon at a time and divided it into four little dabs. This made cookies slightly larger than a quarter, which was perfect for my family.

Bake cookies for 13 minutes at 350F, slightly less time if you want them softer; we wanted crisp. This recipe makes, um, a lot of little cookies; it filled a 10 cup container.

I do not know how long these keep, they were finished within 3 days. Even my husband ate them (note to self: do not tell husband that muesli has dates or he will never eat them again). I have several other types of cereal in the cupboard, so I'm going to keep making different kinds until I can find the tastiest, highest protein, lowest cost, batch of breakfast cookies that my family will still eat. Once I figure out a few that work, my goal is to get a ton of cereal on super sale, then spend a day and make batch after batch of breakfast cookies, and freeze them in 1 gallon zip-top bags. I'm sure they will freeze well, since oatmeal cookies do. Of course the way my family mowed through them, it's possible I won't need to freeze any at all.