Perfect High Altitude Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Baking at 8300ft has proven to be a challenge for me.  Inevitable I either add too much or too little flour when attempting to adjust a recipe for altitude.  I discovered this recipe for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies and they turned out so perfectly (twice!) that I'll never try another recipe.

Perfect High Altitude Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups + 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups old fashioned oat meal
2 cups chocolate chips


1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)


1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees and place butter on stove top to soften while oven heats up.

2. Mix together the softened butter and sugars. Add the vanilla and eggs mixing well on medium speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes.

3. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and mix well. Add the oatmeal and mix well. 

4. Add the chocolate chips and mix gently on low until they are evenly incorporated into the dough. 

5. Place tablespoon size balls of dough on a cookie sheet.  

6. Bake cookies for 8-10 minutes, until the cookies are puffed and the edges no longer look shiny.  They will look very underbaked, but will be perfect after they settle and cool.  Allow cookies to rest on the cookie sheet for a couple of minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

Since the point of this blog is supposed to be about growing our own food or at least buying locally grown food, I am including a photo of my cookies with the raw milk from Moon Hill Dairy.  Because raw milk is illegal to sell in Colorado, we have bought a share of a cow and pay a boarding fee to the diary.  They test the milk weekly to make sure it is safe to consume.  It is sooooo much more tasty than pasteurized homogenized milk.


The first batch of these cookies that I made disappeared quite quickly.  I guess there is a cookie monster that lives somewhere in the Clarktic Circle.  I made a second batch tonight so we could take some on our backpacking trip this weekend.  Tim isn't a fan of nuts in baked goods, so this time I made the first two sheets without nuts and the second two sheets with about half a cup of chopped walnuts.  Turns out he likes nuts just fine!  I might have figured out who the cookie monster is.