Recipe: Coconut Oil Cowboy Cookies

My mom and I didn't have any butter when we wanted to bake cookies over the weekend, but she did have coconut oil, so we looked for a recipe that specifically called for that. We found this recipe on The Whole Dish.

Ingredients (double the recipe to make more cookies!)

• 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ¼ tsp. salt
• ⅓ cup granulated sugar
• ¼ cup brown sugar, packed
• 1 large egg
• ½ cup melted coconut oil
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• ½ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• ½ cup dried cranberries
• ½ cup sweetened shredded coconut, loosely packed

Directions 

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Add the oats, flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt to a large bowl. Stir to combine.
3. In a medium bowl, add the granulated sugar, brown sugar, and egg. Whisk until smooth. Add the melted (but not hot) coconut oil and vanilla. Whisk until well combined (about 1 minute).
4. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Stir until all dry ingredients are moistened.
5. Add the chocolate chips, dried cranberries, and shredded coconut. Stir until they are well incorporated in the cookie batter. This is a thick batter so this will take some effort.
6. Drop large rounded tablespoons of cookie dough onto a baking sheet. Leave about 2 inches around each cookie. Use your fingers to press the cookies together if they are crumbly. Bake for 8-9 minutes. Do not over bake. Cookies will look soft but will continue to crisp as they cool.
7. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes. Then, transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to continue cooling.

As usual, I did make some changes to the recipe. We had already run out of chocolate chips and brown sugar, so we skipped the chocolate chips and used regular sugar instead. But we did have little bits of Heath Bar toffee, so we put in a cup of those instead. And since we had already made coconut cookies earlier, we skipped that for this recipe, too. This recipe says to add the wet ingredients to the dry ones, but we did the opposite and the cookies turned out fine. We rolled the dough in our hands to make little balls, and then pressed them onto the cookie sheets. I also recommend using parchment paper on the cookie sheets for easy clean-up. We did double the recipe, so we almost got 50 cookies out of this recipe!