Taken With A Pinch Of Salt

I have a lot of excuses to make, and most of them are along the lines of 'procrastination' and 'revision' and 'new job', so rather than dwell on the reasons I've pretty much failed as a food blogger recently, I'm going to ply you all with cookies to make you love me again. You do love me, right?

Shall I tell you what I love? Food, Glorious Food, and specifically, Antonia, for giving me this lovely award that it's taken me such a bad-mannered length of time to post about. Thank you so much Antonia!! I have no idea what Arte Y Pico means, but I do speak the language of... food? so when I pass the award on to five other deserving food bloggers - further down in this post - for their creativity, design, interesting material, and contribution to the blogging community (I copied and pasted that. You could tell, yeah?) you will know that what I really mean is 'YAY LOVE YOU, YUM YUM HEEEE'. And so on.

You know what else I YAY LOVE YUM YUM HEEEE? These cookies. You may have seen them before; they're the salted white chocolate oatmeal cookies from Smitten Kitchen. I imagine Smitten Kitchen as an actual big farmhouse kitchen with sheepdogs and a range and lots of these cookies; also, I want to live there. As a permanent resident. I ate one of these cookies fresh from the oven, and they were just the right mix of salty-sweetness and crispy-softness and other such culinary contradictions.

I don't know where sentences like that come from, I really don't. Sorry.

Without further ado: I'm making an effort not to pass this award onto people I've tagged before (sorry, because a lot of you really do deserve it. Also I hope I can remember who I've tagged and not tagged before, but can't be sure X__X), so with that in mind, I'd like to give the Arte Y Pico award to the following five bloggers:

Kevin at Closet Cooking

Nilmandra at Soy & Pepper

Maria at The Goddess' Kitchen

Lisa at Spicy Icecream

Grace at A Southern Grace

Salted Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookies
American measurements here at Smitten Kitchen
Makes 24

140g plain flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
200g unsalted butter, slightly softened
180g sugar
30g light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
250g old-fashioned rolled oats
170g good-quality white chocolate bar, chopped
1/2 teapoon flaky sea salt (for sprinkling on top)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line baking sheet with parchment paper or Silpat. Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, and table salt in a medium bowl.

2. Beat butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Scrape down bowl with rubber spatula, then add egg and vanilla and beat until incorporated. Scrape down bowl again. Add flour mixture gradually and mix until just incorporated and smooth. Gradually add oats and white chocolate and mix until well incorporated.

3. Divide dough into 24 equal portions, each about 2 tablespoons. Roll between palms into balls, then place on lined baking sheets about 2 1/2 inches apart. Using fingertips, gently press down each ball to about ¾-inch thickness.

4. Sprinkle a flake or two of sea salt on each cookie

5. Bake until cookies are deep golden brown, about 13 to 16 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through. Transfer baking sheet to wire rack to cool.

PS: And in case you were thinking I couldn't fail any more... huge thank you to Diva at The Sugar Bar for the 'You Make My Day' award, which I completely forgot to mention and now feel like a fool about. It made me smile so much! Rather than pass this one on, since I'm in a hurry and trying not to draw attention to how I forgot to tag others earlier, I'd like to ask everyone to take a look at some of the blogs on my -newly updated- blogroll (right); all of them are fantastic, and I visit them so often. They all really deserve this, because reading everyone's blogs cheers me right up XD.

As do cookies, but in a different way.