Cookie Monster: Crunchy Almond Butter Oatmeal Cookies

I've been developing sweets recipes for two columns—Wake and Bake and Cookie Monster—every week for the last three years. That's a lot of breakfast sweets and cookies (about 312 finished recipes, to be exact). The first thing that people have always asked me is, what do you DO with all that food? And though I hate to admit it, it's true: there is only so much sugar that my husband and I can consume alone.

When people ask me I tell them the truth, which is that I offload my extras onto his officemates. I don't worry too much about sending in only the best specimens because my philosophy has always been well, someone MIGHT eat them, and that's better than throwing anything out. And eat them they did. Nearly every box and bag of sweets were demolished (or so says my husband) though it was interesting to see what people really enjoyed. (Ex: bar cookies were always wiped out within the first few hours while any cake that wasn't pre-cut was only picked at.)

So when it came time to bake my last cookie recipe for this column (I'll still be baking, just not on a weekly basis) I knew that my husband was going to be let down—in fact I think his exact words were "this is a travesty"—but I didn't think about the collateral damage. I just baked my last batch, packed them up, and sent them with him to work.

Then this arrived in my inbox from one of his officemates:

I'm glad that Cookie Monster will be missed, since I'll certainly miss it, and I'm glad that the last batch seemed to be a hit.

I went with an almond butter cookie because a few months ago fellow editor Maggie and I noticed we didn't have an almond butter cookie recipe on the site. Given that almond butter is a staple in my house, I couldn't leave without putting one up.

What I love about making cookies with nut butters is that, at their simplest, they don't need flour. With just some old fashioned oats, sugar, brown sugar, and an egg to act as the binder, the cookies bake up super crisp and crunchy. Vanilla extract rounds out the flavor, and the brown sugar adds depth, but these taste first and foremost like almond butter, in the way that a good peanut butter cookie tastes like peanut butter.

Note that these cookies will look slightly under-baked when you take them out of the oven but they will harden as they cool, so leave them on the baking sheet for at least 15 minutes before moving them. Also note that any that happen to go uneaten and get smushed up in the tupperware make a lovely topping for vanilla ice cream.

And with that, Cookie Monster out.