Chocolate Chip Gingerbread Oatmeal Cookies

 
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Welcome to Day #4 of Cookie Week on Amy’s Healthy Baking! This week, I’m posting a few new cookie recipes on my blog that would be perfect for the holidays, and I’m also sharing some of my old favorites on both Facebook and Instagram. Be sure to check those out—other readers have been raving about them!  

One year during my childhood, my aunt and I convinced everyone else that it would be fun to decorate gingerbread cookies as family bonding time during the holiday break. They cautiously agreed, under the condition that we’d take care of all of the baking and dish washing, so we pulled down an old cookbook from the shelf and started assembling ingredients.
 

 
We created quite the mess while rolling out the cookie dough (flour filled the air like snow, even though we lived in warm California where that never actually happens!), and half-filled baking sheets of assorted sizes lay scattered across the countertops. With a very extensive collection of cookie cutters—everything from Santa and his sleigh to candy canes and snowmen to camels and stars to musical notes and the Pillsbury dough boy—we punched out plenty of shapes for people to choose from.

Once the cookies cooled, my brother and I mixed up a simple icing with milk and powdered sugar, and after separating it into tiny plastic bowls, we squirted in a few drops of generic food coloring to make green, yellow, blue, and pink. (Yes, Santa had a pink suit that year… We ran out of dye before we could turn the icing deep red!)

The rest of our family took turns sitting in chairs around our small kitchen table. With a plate at each place and the pile of cooled gingerbread cookies in the center, they grabbed a few shapes and spread icing on top with spoons or knives. Nobody was quite patient enough to pipe it on in pretty lines or designs!
 

Once a rainbow of icing adorned each cookie and had fully dried, we stacked the cookies on two large dinner plates and put those on top of the refrigerator. Our golden retriever loved to jump on the kitchen counters to sneak any bits of food he could find when we weren’t looking (or even when we were!), so that tall hiding place was the safest spot.

In the early evening, not too long before dinner, I walked into the kitchen to sneak a cookie. After grabbing one off of the first dinner plate and quickly shoving it back on top of the fridge, I scampered off to my room before anyone noticed. But…

Apparently I hadn’t pushed the plate back far enough and it was precariously balanced on the top of the door, so when Mom opened the fridge to pull out bread and cheese for dinner, the entire plate came crashing down and broke into hundreds of pieces—along with all of those gingerbread cookies!
 

 
To this day, I’m still slightly superstitious and afraid of what will happen if I try making cutout cookies again, so to get my gingerbread fix this year, I baked these Chocolate Chip Gingerbread Cookies instead! They have the same cozy, iconic flavors as those gingerbread men, but as regular drop-style cookies, there’s no dough to roll out or countertops to get messy. And chocolate always makes everything better, too!

This is the next installment in my clean eating oatmeal cookies recipe series. Have you tried any of the others? They’re the most popular recipes on my blog—and for a good reason! They’re all soft and chewy, but they contain no butter, refined flour or sugar. Plus the baked cookies freeze really well, so you can always have healthy homemade cookies on hand, which is perfect for the holiday season!
 

 
Like the rest of the recipes, this one starts with whole wheat flour and instant oats. Instant oats are also called quick-cooking or minute oats. They aren’t the same thing as those flavored individual brown paper packets! Instant oats are sold in large canisters right next to the traditional old-fashioned oats in the grocery store.

Tip: You can easily make your own instant oats! Simply add the same amount of old-fashioned oats to a blender or food processor, and pulse until the oats are half of their original size.

It’s very important to measure the oats correctly using either the spoon-and-level method or a kitchen scale. Oats act like little sponges and soak up moisture in the cookie dough, so too many oats will turn your cookies cakey or crumbly. I highly recommend a kitchen scale! This is the inexpensive one that I own, and I use it to make every recipe on this blog. A kitchen scale ensures that your baked goods turn out with the perfect taste and texture every time!
 

 
The gingerbread flavor comes from two main sources: the spices and the molasses. You’ll need four different ground spices for today’s recipe, which are ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. While ginger is the star of the show, the others work together to round out the flavor and create the cozy taste.

Molasses is a thick brown liquid with a similar consistency to honey. It provides the warm background flavor that’s so iconic to gingerbread, and it also accentuates the spicy ginger taste. Do not substitute anything for it! Molasses is very inexpensive, and you can find it on the baking aisle near the other liquid sweeteners, as well as online.
 

 
And of course, my favorite part is the chocolate chips! I have a secret trick that I use in all of my chocolate chip cookie recipes: I always add two different types! I start with these dark chocolate chips for a big burst of flavor (and they’re heavenly when still melty and gooey straight from the oven!), and I finish with mini chocolate chips to ensure that every bite contains a morsel of chocolate.

Just look at how tempting they are!
 

 
Who needs cookie cutters when you could eat these instead??
 

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