24. Oat Lace Cookies (p. 665)

Last weekend, I decided to treat myself to one of the items on my Kitchen Wishlist. (See the list on the left if you're looking for a gift for your favorite cook-through blogger. Hint, hint.) I am now the proud owner of a Silpat!

I decided to make these Oat Lace Cookies as my inaugural Silpat cooking experience. The Silpat worked exactly as I hoped and dreamed it would, and I'm looking forward to keeping it in regular rotation in the kitchen. The cookies on the other hand, were much less impressive.

The recipe is fairly easy. It's just a few ingredients (butter, sugar, toasted oats) stirred together on the stove. Then you put two-teaspoon mounds of the mixture on your Silpat and pop them in the oven for a little while. The batter melts, spreads and hardens into lacy, crisp and delicate cookies that, according to The Book, are special enough to serve to company.

Well, my first batch wasn't company-ready. I followed the directions about how much batter to use and how far apart to put the cookies, but they fused together into one giant cookie. The same thing happend to Teena when she made these, so I know it's not just me. As I took them off the cookie sheet, they broke up into a bunch of cookie-shards.

For the remaining batches, I made the batter mounds half the size (one teaspoon) and put them even farther apart. The results were better. At least the cookies didn't fuse together, but they still broke when I lifted them off the cookie sheet. This wasn't the fault of the Silpat. They didn't stick at all, they were just too fragile, and cracked as I tried to lift them. In the end, I only had three photo-worthy cookies out of an expected yield of eighteen.

After all of that, how do they taste? Just OK. Overall, the flavor was good: sweet and caramel-y, but I thought that they were way too buttery. Also, even though the oats were toasted, they had a kind of "raw" taste. Finally, these come across much more as a candy than a cookie in terms of texture and taste. Definitely not my favorite so far.

Date Cooked: July 13, 2008
Degree of Difficulty: Pretty Easy
Rating: C