chocolate chip oatmeal cookies

9/13/13- Updated with recipe- Welcome to the life of a stress baker. Only a few hours away till Day 1 of 3 of this dreadful exam! Clearly, they had to make accountants face some kind of mental trauma before getting those two letters after our names. Anyhow, I decided to make oatmeal cookies to keep myself busy during these hours :)

chewy oatmeal cookies

It's already June! I can't believe how time just flies sometimes! Busy season is over. Already fully back into school, but it feels quite unreal that I'll be writing my UFE this September! It has been such a challenge this past month adjusting back into study mode. It feels that I have so much more time on my hands, but I just need to figure out how to balance everything out. Anyhow, I completely forgot how I was craving omurice for the past two months! I almost forgot. After seeing on another fellow blogger's post about this amazing dish, I knew that I wanted to make it too. It makes use of one of my favorite condiments: ketchup!

OMURICE <33

I also made oatmeal cookies recently! As requested, you'll find the recipe in here ;). Please do excuse the instagram pictures. Papa unfortunately took back his camera so cheers to filtered pictures for now! These are one of my favorite cookie recipes! My love for oatmeal is truly unconditional. And so, I love all the rest of its by-products.

baked strawberry oatmeal

I can't believe I haven't baked anything with strawberries yet. It's one of those fruits that I just love to eat. I think I could eat it every day just like bananas and oatmeal. I present to you, the baked strawberry oatmeal. I'll admit that it looks terrible and not quite appetizing, but I like to think that it is its rustic charm.

 baked strawberry oatmeal

pb oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Now that's a killer long name for a cookie. It's really random how I bake these cookies. A good friend of mine brought us these amaziiiiing store bought peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. After one, I just wanted another. Knowing all the bad stuff in the store bought ones, I decided it would be better to make my own healthy version of it. There's something about pairing peanut butter and chocolate that just mind-blowing! I love pb & jelly, but with chocolate.. It's a whole new level of yumminess if that would exist.

when chocolate goodness meets PB awesomeness

lemon crumb squares

When life gives you lemons, make lemon crumb squares. Following up my lemon blueberry loaf, I still had some leftover lemon that I had to used. At first, I was contemplating between lemon sugar cookies or lemon bar. Since I'm always making cookies, I decided to give this recipe a try. I saw a can of sweetened condensed milk in my pantry and what better way to use it than to make these lemon crumb squares!

lemon bar squares

oatmeal carrot cake cookies

There's still some grated carrot leftover from my carrot muffins, but I think it'll be easy to use that up. So with most of the remaining carrot, I decided to make cookies. They turned out to be super moist and also surprisingly healthy! This makes an amazing guilt-free afternoon snack.

Nom nom nom

failed oatmeal muffins

Next time I see the words "healthy" and "oatmeal" in a recipe, I'll skip it. I did make some minor changes to the recipe that might have affected the taste. The muffins are interesting as one of my friends would say. They are quite bland. This recipe called for 1/3 cup of brown sugar for 1 cup of rolled oats and 1 cup of flour. Go figure! But they did have 1 cup of semi sweet chocolate.. which I substituted for 1/2 cup of raisins and 1/2 cup of the chips... that was a big mistake. It also had surprisingly not a lot of fatty ingredients (only 1 egg and 1/4 cup of butter).  No wonder the recipe I used said to put a nice pat of butter on these muffins when eating them.

stuck with a dozen of these bad boys

I'm very happy that today I decided not the double the recipe. I'll need to find a better oatmeal muffin recipe in the future. Though that might not be in the near future. Most of my posts are actually related to oatmeal now that I look at it.. but there is a logical explanation behind this!

early morning oatmeal

An early start today with freshly baked cookies :) The girls are coming over to finalizing our trip planning, so why not take this opportunity to bake? I cheated though.. I prepared the dough last night and just rolls them into balls and popped them in the oven. It made it so much easier (and a lot less dish washing in the morning). While making the dough last night, I realized how thankful I am having a stand mixer at home. Although I don't use it to make muffins, I don't think I'd bake as much if I didn't have one. It just makes the whole baking process sooooo much easier (and they also come in awesome colours too..).

Fresh out of the oven by 8 AM

I've always had a soft spot for oatmeal. I went into an odd oatmeal phase during CA school, especially for overnight oatmeal. I was pretty hyped about using chia seeds (the same one for the chia pets!), but I thought it was a little weird to eat porridge cold. Anyways, because of that, I bought a lot of oatmeal, a bag of around 1.5 kg. Actually, it was an oatmeal mix with flax seeds and wheat germs in it. I thought it'd have a more noticeable impact on the cookie's taste and texture, but I couldn't really tell... maybe Mike would. It does have quite a bit of sugar in it though, so that might mask its taste!