Peanut butter oatmeal no-bake cookies

Yes. These are no-bake cookies. Yes, I'm slumming. What's my excuse? All those leftover little bits of things from holiday baking that are languishing in the cupboard taking up precious space. This recipe used up a couple of those.

Peanut butter oatmeal bites

Adapted from Better Homes & Gardens

Ingredients

½ cup peanut butter

⅓ cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla

1¼ cups shredded coconut, divided

1 cup rolled oats

¼ cup semisweet chocolate pieces (or bittersweet if you prefer)

¼ cup snipped dried cherries (or other dried fruit)

Method

Mix peanut butter, honey and vanilla in a bowl until well combined. Stir in ½ cup coconut, oats, chocolate and fruit. Cover and chill 30 minutes.

Roll mixture into 30 balls, each about 1-inch around. Roll in remaining coconut to coat. Store in refrigerator.  You can store the unrolled dough for a week, rolling them into balls as you need them and have time. The original recipe called for pulsing the coconut you use for coating into smaller pieces, which I imagine gives it a slightly different look as a finished cookie, but I didn’t bother and it still stuck fairly well.

Rating: Let's face it. No-bake cookies are really pretty tasty, one of those things that fall into the guilty pleasure category. Unlike the no-bake cookies that were the stuff of school cafeteria legend growing up, these at least sneak some fruit into the mix. But at 111 calories for a tiny cookie, who are we kidding? 

They do have the advantage that they're pretty easy to make gluten free, providing you buy gluten free oats and vanilla, so if you've got some GFreers on the horizon, there's that. They make a perfectly dandy thing to stick in a picnic basket as a small finishing treat.

If this has you nostalgic for those school cookies, here's the recipe I copied years ago from Marguerite Bauer of Manning, Iowa, as submitted for the Carroll Times Herald's annual "What's Cookin' for the Holidays" special section published Nov. 9, 1983. I still have that reader-submitted issue grown yellow with age, although it hasn't seen much use. One only needs so many recipes for Seafoam Salad.

No bake cookies

Ingredients

2 cups sugar

¼ pound of butter

½ cup peanut butter

3 cups oatmeal

½ cup cocoa

1 teaspoon vanilla

Method

Combine sugar, butter and milk in a medium-size saucepan. Bring to a hard boil for 1 minute. Stir in peanut butter, oatmeal, cocoa and vanilla. Drop by spoonfuls on foil. Store refrigerated.

Rating: If you liked the no-bake cookies they gave you in junior high, you'll like these. If you didn't, you still won't.