Baking Bouchon - Recipe 2: Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

I don't like raisins, but I do like these cookies.  I'm generally against fruit outside of its natural state.  I just recently started eating jelly, canned pie filling makes me gag and please, please, do not suspend fruit in jell-o.  I'll eat Craisins in salad or a rice dish but that's about as far as I'll take the dried fruit thing.  But for some reason, I can get past the raisins.
If you want the recipe, just search for Bouchon Oatmeal Raisin Cookies and you'll find it on some other blogs who posted it.  The ingredients were pretty basic oatmeal cookie stuff with the exception of the Vanilla Bean Paste.  I've been hunting for it for a while and finally bound it at Sur La Table the other day.  It is kind of a cross between scraped vanilla beans and vanilla extract.  However, I think you could easily substitute Vanilla extract.

One of the things about the Bouchon recipes are that everything is measured by weight.  I happen to love this technique.  I have a little scale that I use and the best part is that you actually end up with less dishes because you don't have to use measuring cups or spoons.  Just stick your bowl on the scale, zero it out and pour the ingredients in.  However, this was the first time that I've ever weighed eggs.  Thomas instructs us to crack the eggs, beat them with a fork and strain them before weighing them.  My only issue was that I didn't know how much a typical egg weighs so couldn't even guess how many I needed to come up with 62 grams of eggs.  Well, it's not quite 2 eggs and since I couldn't bring myself to throw out the rest, I now have 1/4 of an egg sitting in my fridge.

I was supposed to divide the dough into 6 cookies using an ice cream scoop.  I did use my ice cream scoop but ended up with 12 big cookies so had I only made 6 they would have been as big as my head.

The cookies have a nice crispy exterior and are still chewy in the middle.  There's a great cinnamon flavor to them (which I worried wouldn't be prominent enough because I didn't have quite as much cinnamon as the recipe called for, but I think in the end it was plenty).

Overall, redemption from my first crack at a Bouchon recipe.  I plan to rotate through the sections of the book so I don't overload on one type of baked good.  Up next are Plain Scones.  Mmmmm, Butter.

Julie