I woke up Sunday morning craving oatmeal raisin cookies something fierce, so I tried to make myself eat oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar in it for breakfast but that didn’t work, and so there was nothing left to do but to bake cookies. My life is so hard, innit?

I have very specific tastes in oatmeal raisin cookies. A crisp edge is always welcome, but the rest of it must be thick and chewy. Just to confuse, this is unlike other oatmeal cookie recipes on this site, the crunchier chocolate chip pecan version and the thick but shattery, salty white chocolate version. Nope, my oatmeal raisin cookies demand their own texture, and one I can’t get from those other recipes.

I start with the standard recipe on every can of Quaker oats and then start making it better. I find it too sweet, so I dial back the sugar. It never has enough raisins in it, so I up them. I use only brown sugar (instead of a mix of brown and white). And sometimes, though not this one, I add chopped walnuts because they were made to go together.

And then I try not to eat them for breakfast. (It’s got oats and dried fruit, right? Like granola!) I, uh, don’t always succeed.