Description

These soft and chewy Iced Oatmeal Cookies are filled with brown butter, cozy spices, and lots of oats for the most amazing texture. They bake up into perfect craggy cookies, which are then dipped into a quick icing glaze for a picture perfect iced oatmeal cookie!

Ingredients

Scale

Oatmeal Cookies

120g old fashioned oats (toasts down to 100g, see notes in the method)
130g unsalted butter, cold from the fridge is fine
95g brown sugar
65g granulated sugar
20g molasses
1 large egg (50g not including the shell), at room temperature
150g all-purpose flour
1 tsp (3g) kosher salt or 1/2 tsp table salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder

Icing

190g powdered sugar, sifted if lumpy
35g whole milk

Instructions

OATMEAL COOKIES

Preheat the oven to 350°f / 180°c. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper. Place the oats on another sheet pan. Bake, stirring occasionally, until the oats are lightly golden brown, 10-15 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave to cool - this should happen in the time you are browning the butter and mixing up the wet ingredients.
Weigh out 100g of the toasted oats. Place the cooled oats in a small food processor or nutribullet and pulse 10 times - it should have some larger chunks and some smaller pieces - see image in the blog post.
While the oats are toasting, brown the butter. Place the butter into a small saucepan and melt over medium heat. Cook the butter, whisking frequently, until the milk solids begin to brown. Continue to cook until the butter mixture is medium brown and nutty smelling. Remove the brown butter from the heat and weigh out 100g into a medium bowl (see notes below). Leave to stand for 10 minutes so that the warm butter does not scramble your eggs. If you would like to speed up this method, you can place the bowl into a larger bowl of cold water, stirring frequently until the brown butter has cooled slightly and is no longer hot to the touch.
Add the brown sugar, granulated sugar, molasses, and egg to the bowl with the butter. Using a whisk or a handheld electric mixer, beat until slightly thicker and lighter in consistency and colour.
Add the blended oats, flour, salt, cinnamon, cardamom, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix with a spatula to combine.
Leave the batter to stand at room temperature for 5 minutes to allow it to hydrate slightly.
Using a #24 cookie scoop, scoop 55g balls of cookie dough onto the prepared baking sheets. I like to bake my cookies one tray at a time but if you would like to do both at once, then go ahead.
Space the cookies evenly on the sheet pans - I do 6 on one pan and 4 on the other.
Bake the cookies for 12-13 minutes, until set around the edges and in the middle. You want to make sure they are properly baked - if they are too soft they may be hard to dip.
Remove from the oven and lightly tap the sheet pan on a heatproof surface to deflate the cookies slightly. Using a round cookie cutter slightly larger than the cookie or something else round (the cutter I used was 3 3/4" / 95mm), gently scoot the cookies into a nice round shape.
If you have not baked the second pan of cookies, go ahead and do so. Leave the cookies to cool on the pan for 10-15 minutes then transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before icing.

ICING

In a medium bowl (ideally something slightly shallow), combine the powdered sugar and milk, stirring well to combine.
Working with one cookie at a time, dip the top of the cookie in the icing - there is a bit of knack to this - you want to go straight up and down, and only lightly dip the cookie into the icing so that it sticks to the craggly bits. Place the dipped cookies onto a cooling rack or sheet pan, and allow to stand at room temperature for a few hours to allow the icing to fully set.
Store cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for up to a week.

Notes

If you are not using toasted oats, you can skip the toasting step and just use 100g old fashioned oats.

You will notice that there are two quantities of butter in the recipe - the initial quantity of butter, then a second measurement in the method which is the quantity of brown butter. The larger initial quantity is to account for water loss when browning - read more about that in my FAQ.

A note on Brown Butter

You will notice that there are two quantities of butter in the recipe - the initial quantity called for in the recipe (130g), and then a weighed out quantity in the method (100g). This is intentional and is not a typo.

When you brown butter, you are cooking off the water in the butter, and cooking the milk solids, which is what gives you the brown part of brown butter. Due to the loss of moisture, the overall volume of the butter when it goes from solid or melted butter to brown butter will decrease.

The recipe accounts for this which is why I have given you two quantities of butter. Butter varies internationally in how much fat / water it contains, so some butter will cook down to a lower yield than others depending on how much water you cook out, hence the need to re-weigh your butter once you have browned it.

If you are using the recipe scaling feature (2x or 3x) be aware that any quantities, measurements, pan sizes, and cooking times given in the method do not scale automatically - it's only the quantities in the Ingredient List that scale automatically.

Can I make these larger / smaller than the recipe suggests?
This iced oatmeal cookie recipe makes 10 cookies. Feel free to scale the sizing if you like, but I tested a bunch of sizes and the 55g dough ball is the best size to me, so you do you here but I have warned you!