Oatmeal butterscotch cookies

I was warming up dinner yesterday and bet myself that I couldn't make cookies from scratch before dinner was ready.  I ended up losing the bet, but came pretty close.  I was reheating frozen meat sauce and boiling water for pasta, so it wasn't a very complicated dinner, and I had already started it when this idea came to me.  I might try and make a habit of baking something whenever I'm making something simple for dinner.

I've had Nestle's butterscotch pieces in the cabinet for at least a year, and just haven't had cause to use them yet.  I would have followed the regular Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe adding butterscotch chips, but I had no regular chocolate chips.  Instead I used the Oatmeal Scotchies recipe printed on the package and made a few modifications.

The ingredients

The only oatmeal I had was leftover from the Oatmeal Raisin Cookies I made a few weeks ago.  It looked like it might be a cup and a half (if that) so I halved all the ingredients in the recipe.  It was a little tricky to eyeball 3/8 of a cup of sugar, but I wanted to have the cookies done quickly and didn't stop to measure more precisely.  

I didn't just cut the recipe in half, I also added two things: walnuts and cardamom.  I've been on a cardamom kick lately; I've added it to the recipe for the last two things I've baked.  I really added just a small pinch of cardamom, I didn't want to go overboard.

I mixed the butter, vanilla, and sugars with the whisk attachment, then added the dry ingredients.  First the flour, baking soda, and cinnamon, then chunkier ingredients later.  Because I cut the recipe in half, I only needed half the bag of butterscotch chips, but about 3/4s ended up in the batter.  Oh well.

Not enough room to mash

The walnuts needed to be broken up a bit, so I used a ramekin and a spoon as mortar and pestle.  Ramekin is a word I had never heard until I worked in a restaurant, but I don't know what I called them before I learned that word.  I guess if anything we called them custard cups.  I put too many walnuts in the ramekin here, they would overflow when I tried to mash them up.

I waited to preheat the oven until the cookies were ready to shape, otherwise the oven is ready way too early.  I don't know how much energy this wastes, but it makes me feel like an idiot when the oven beeps and I'm still assembling the ingredients.

Ready to shape

They took 2-3 minutes more to bake than the 8-10 minutes the recipe advised, and even then they were just beginning to brown around the edges.

The cookies are tasty and came out good considering how much scrounging I did for the ingredients.  They don't look much like the picture

Out of the oven