Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies

I really need to get back into my blogging but after the holiday rush of cake balls and the busy tax season, I have found I spend all my time trying to catch-up on life.  Along with tax season comes college interns at work and we cannot always find enough work to keep them busy, so this year they have been given the task of putting together a March Madness competition but given that most of our interns this year are girls who are not really into March Madness, we also had the interns put together a Dessert Madness competition!

Our lovely interns have put together a 5 week dessert competition where we go head-to-head against other teams to compete for the best dessert in the group.  For our first competition we had the classic chocolate chip cookie.  As I try to be a team player and do not want to be considered a ball hog, I asked for a volunteer from my team to step up and make the first round of cookies.  It was like pulling teeth!  I guess not every accountant is as enthusiastic about baking as I am.  Finally, I had a taker, and she made wonderful deep dish cookies topped with vanilla bean ice cream! Yum!  So we survived the first round of competition and this week was Round 2 with the dreaded Oatmeal Fruit category.  I really tried to get takers to volunteer to bake this round but of course no volunteers.

I have to admit, I am not a big oatmeal cookie fan so I was less than thrilled to compete in this round.  I spent several days searching Pinterest and the internet for a great oatmeal cookie that would be unique enough to set my team apart from all the other oatmeal raisin and oatmeal cranberry varieties that are so popular.  I also have a thing against dried fruits, I sort of find them...well.... gross; okay not sort of but I do find dried fruits gross.  Then I stumbled upon these yummy sounding cookies at Picky Palate.  These were definitely different enough for me to wanna try them and there was no raisins or cranberries!  There was dried blueberries in her recipe but that was an easy change.  I think using fresh blueberries gave the cookies a nice fresh "blueberry muffin" sort of feel, but you are welcome to use dried blueberries if you must.

Recipe adapted from Picky Palate

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups oatmeal
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 cups fresh blueberries
1 cup white chocolate chips (optional)



(1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  In a stand mixer, beat the butter and sugars until light and fluffy.  Beat in eggs and vanilla until well combined.

2.  Place flour, oatmeal, baking soda and salt into a large bowl; mix to combine.  Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients along with the blueberries and white chocolate chips.  Mix until just combined.

3.  Scoop dough onto a cookie sheet and  bake for 9-11 minutes or until edges are just turning golden brown.  Remove and let cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan.

I must say that these cookies totally changed my perspective on oatmeal cookies!! I couldn't help but snatch at least one hot fresh cookie off of each tray of cookies that come out of the oven..... I will say that I was nearly a dozen cookies short due to the extensive quality control going on :)  If you are not an oatmeal cookie fan, you MUST give these a try before you completely dismiss the classic oatmeal cookie.

I am happy to say that we have survived another week and next week's dessert round is Brownies, stay tuned!