What could possibly be so good that it keeps our team talking about it for weeks? You guessed it…these insanely delicious Oatmeal Cookies! The golden crispy edges and chewy center had us hooked! We added raisins for the classic oatmeal raisin cookie, but feel free to swap out the raisins for your own favorite cookie add-ins. I’ll share a few different options below. Just know these oatmeal cookies are the absolute best way to satisfy your sweet tooth on a budget!😉
Ingredients For Oatmeal Cookies
Here are the ingredients you need to make these delicious oatmeal raisin cookies:
- Old-fashioned Rolled Oats: It wouldn’t be an oatmeal cookie without the oats! The oats provide a chewy texture to the cookies. Make sure to use old-fashioned rolled oats and not quick oats.
- Butter: Butter is the base for many cookies. It gives the cookies plenty of richness and creamy buttery flavor.
- Brown sugar & Granulated white sugar: I like using a combination of both brown and white sugar to sweeten the cookies.
- Egg: Egg helps bind all of the ingredients together.
- Vanilla: Vanilla extract adds a touch of warm flavor to the cookies.
- Baking Soda: A small amount of baking soda helps the cookies rise just a little bit.
- Flour: All-purpose flour gives the cookies structure.
- Cinnamon: Cinnamon spice adds just a little bit more flavor and the perfect finishing touch to these chewy cookies.
- Raisins: Raisins are a classic addition to oatmeal cookies with the perfect contrast and sweetness. But feel free to try some other variations if you wan’t a slightly different flavor profile. We’ll list a few suggestions below.
Oatmeal Cookie Variations
Here are a few different options if you want to switch things up with your oatmeal cookies:
- Dried cranberries: I love swapping the raisins for Craisins or dried cranberries whenever I can catch them on sale at my local grocery store.
- Chopped nuts: Looking for a little crunch? Add about 1/2 cup of chopped pecans or walnuts to the dough.
- Chocolate or Butterscotch chips: These oatmeal cookies also taste great with your favorite baking chips. My favorite combination is a few butterscotch chips and a few chopped pecans. SO good! If you’re adding chocolate or butterscotch chips, I would add them in place of the raisins.
Should You Chill The Cookie Dough?
Many cookie recipes suggest chilling the cookie dough in the refrigerator prior to baking. This is to prevent the cookies from spreading too much in the oven as they bake. We tested these oatmeal cookies two different ways. First, chilling the dough for 30 minutes prior to baking, and second, baking the cookies without chilling the dough. We actually preferred the texture of the cookies without chilling the dough. It yielded a thinner cookie with crispy edges and a perfect chewy center. However, this is more of a personal preference. If you prefer a thicker cookie, then feel free to refrigerate the cookie dough for 30-60 minutes prior to baking.
Storing Oatmeal Cookies
So what happens when you’re feeling snack-ish, you’re craving something sweet, and you forgot about the extra oatmeal cookies that you stashed in your freezer? You realize you just hit the jackpot!! That’s exactly what happened to us at the studio. We had extra cookies that we stored in the freezer and were super excited to gobble them up 2 weeks later. These cookies store very well in an air-tight container at room temperature for up to 1 week or store in a freezer-safe bag for up to 3 months. When you’re in the mood for a little something sweet, just take one or two cookies out of the freezer, thaw at room temperature and enjoy!
Oatmeal Cookies
Servings 18 cookiesIngredients
- 10 Tbsp salted butter, softened ($1.33)
- 1/2 cup granulated white sugar ($0.17)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar ($0.27)
- 1 egg ($0.14)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract ($0.25)
- 1 cup all-purpose flour ($0.20)
- 1/2 tsp salt ($0.02)
- 1/2 tsp baking soda ($0.02)
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon ($0.05)
- 1.5 cups old-fashioned rolled oats ($0.39)
- 3/4 cup raisins ($0.93)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large mixing bowl, add the softened butter, white sugar, and brown sugar. Blend the ingredients together with a hand mixer until smooth.
- Add the egg and vanilla extract to the bowl and blend with the sugar mixture until smooth.
- Next in a separate bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking soda, and cinnamon) until well combined. Add the rolled oats to the dry ingredients and mix until combined.
- Add all of the dry ingredients to the same bowl as the sugar mixture. Blend the ingredients together with a hand mixer on low speed until just combined. Do not overmix.
- Next add the raisins to the bowl and fold them into the cookie dough with a spatula.
- Using a medium cookie scoop or your hands, scoop the cookie dough into roughly 2 Tbsp portions then roll into a ball. Place the cookies on a parchment lined baking sheet about 2-3 inches apart. You'll likely need to cook the cookies in two batches, so keep the remaining dough chilled until ready to roll and bake.*
- Bake the cookies for 13-14 minutes or until lightly golden brown. The center of the cookies may look too soft when you remove them from the oven, but keep in mind the cookies will continue to set as they cool. Let the cookies cool slightly on the baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Enjoy!
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Equipment
Notes
Nutrition
How to Make Oatmeal Cookies – Step by Step Photos
Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large mixing bowl, add 10 Tbsp of softened butter, 1/2 cup granulated white sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Blend the ingredients together with a hand mixer until smooth.
Add 1 egg and 1 tsp vanilla extract to the bowl and blend with the sugar mixture until smooth.
In a separate bowl, whisk together 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp baking soda, and 1/2 tsp cinnamon until well combined.
Add 1 1/2 cups old-fashioned rolled oats to the dry ingredients and mix until combined.
Add all of the dry ingredients to the same bowl as the sugar mixture. Blend the ingredients together with a hand mixer on low speed until just combined. Do not overmix.
Next add 3/4 cup of raisins to the bowl and fold them into the cookie dough with a spatula.
Using a medium cookie scoop or your hands, scoop the cookie dough into roughly 2 Tbsp portions, then roll into a ball. Place the cookies on a parchment lined baking sheet about 2-3 inches apart. You’ll likely need to cook the cookies in two batches, so keep the remaining dough chilled until ready to roll and bake.
Bake the cookies for 13-14 minutes or until lightly golden brown. The center of the cookies may look too soft when you remove them from the oven, but keep in mind the cookies will continue to set as they cool.
Let the cookies cool slightly on the baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Enjoy these irresistible oatmeal cookies with a glass of milk or simply enjoy by themselves and don’t forget to share with your family and friends!😊
Made them with granulated sugar only and they tasted really nice, reminded me of caramel popcorn! Is the popcorn intended or did I make that by accident?
Made them and they’re fabulous. It’s a keeper.
These are sooo good! They were a hit for my toddler and husband! Surprisingly we didn’t have regular cinnamon in the pantry so I used cinnamon-sugar instead and these still weren’t overly sweet. I also put them in the fridge for 30 mins as suggested since I like a thicker cookie. They came out just right! Happy to have a solid oatmeal cookie recipe!
P.S. Happy you guys are keeping this website alive! I love it as a resource for ideas of what to make when money is sometimes tight. Thank you!
Was craving something sweet and tried this recipe. I didn’t have any raisins so I replaced them with a handful of dark chocolate chips. Still came out AMAZING!
These were delicious and looked just like the pictures
You forgot to include the egg and vanilla to the recipe list and step by step instruction.
No, they’re there!
excellent, even with 8 rather than 10 oz. butter
I followed the recipe exactly except I used half the amount of sugar. The dough was extremely sticky and very difficult to roll into a ball, making this a rather time-consuming recipe. My cookies ended up about 2 in in diameter and they were only 15 of them. However the good news is that they taste delicious, are a little chewy which I prefer, and I would not have wanted any more sugar.
In general, I love recipes from Budgetbytes and save and make many of them.
Any thoughts on why my dough was so sticky? Thanks.
My guess is that it’s because you only added half the sugar! Without the additional 1/2 cup of sugar, you have extra moisture from the butter that isn’t adjusted for that missing dry ingredient, making the batter sticky. :)
Forgot to leave a 5 star rating under my comment lol
Unironically I can’t stop eating these cookies. 11/10 and super easy to make especially for someone like me who’s new to baking!
I enjoyed this recipe. It’s a nice, chewy cookie.
It would be great if your recipes had conversions for us outside of America.
I was trying to imagine how you’d measure 10 tablespoons of butter (do you soften it first? sounds messy) and went down an internet rabbit hole where I learned that US butter packages have tablespoon markings on them.
Ours in New Zealand and Australia (and Europe I think) have 25g markings.
No it’s not too hard to Google that 10tbsp is 140g.. but it seems like the conversion could be easily included in brackets.
Love your recipes!
Thanks, Brendan! We get feedback about including metric units a lot, but unfortunately haven’t found a good solution for it yet. There are a lot of plugins and apps that already do automatic conversion (the recipe card that we use actually has that functionality), but while it sounds great in theory, it rarely works well in practice. There are many issues that prevent it from working properly, one of the main reasons being that often you need to not only convert from imperial to metric, but you also need to convert from volume to weight, which requires knowing the density of that particular ingredient. Other big issues include inconsistent ingredient formatting, the fact that we use both weight and volume ounces, and ingredients that contain both solid and liquid material, but the containers only list the “dry” weight. We’ve explored the issue a lot and I just don’t feel comfortable offering metric units unless I can manually remeasure and test each recipe with those units. Right now that’s not feasible, BUT hopefully in the future that’s a project we can put on the list. :)
Doing it going forward even instead of worrying about the back catalogue would still go a long way!
They’re providing free recipes and tips for you. Just use a calculator yourself. It’s not that difficult. Hardly any (none I can think of) do this either. Why single them out?
I didn’t single them out? It was a suggestion (not even originally suggested by me). There’s no need to convert the entire back catalogue before improving things going forward, and it would make things much easier for non-American users. I generally do use a calculator, as I prefer to add ingredients straight to the bowl vs. making more dirty dishes.
Either way, if you can’t think of any cooking blogs that offer conversions, you don’t look at a lot of cooking blogs, or have poor attention to detail. Many (many) do. Mass is more accurate for ingredients that can be compressed (like flour), or produce that is never uniform sizes (75g diced onion vs. 1/2 of a medium onion)…
Loved the recipe, I only used regular sugar instead of half and half and it turn out really well, and even though I overcook them a little bit they were still tasty just a little bit more crunchy than soft but that’s all
I dont have a blender. Is it OK to mix manually?
You can! You just want to make sure that you mix the butter and sugars together very well before moving on.
I used a spatula and worked pretty well, just make sure to evenly mix the sugar and butter mixture, don’t be scare if at the beginning it does not look that even, just keep mixing a little more and it will turn out just fine.
Perfect small batch recipe! Since the one in my recipe box makes about 5-6 dozen, I’m grateful for this one. If, like me, your raisins don’t get used up in a reasonable amount of time, you can always plump them by soaking in a dab of boiling water. Apple juice or even brand brandy or rum can be used. I used to make oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips when my grandsons were young, but DH and I both love raisins.
My cookies didn’t turn out like the picture. They did not bake flat and wide. They remained semi-puffy. Yes, I used a measuring spoon to measure each cookie per the instructions. And after 15 minutes, they still weren’t golden brown, but I had to take them out because the bottoms were brown. They just came out the oven, so I haven’t tasted them. Hopefully, they taste good.
I added another star because they are tasty even though they didn’t look like the photos.
Sounds your oven is wonky.
I find giving the cookie sheet a good bang or two on the countertop right after taking them out of the ove. Helps with this issue and makes for the perfect chewy/crip texture.