Spice Up Your Life

Apple sauce is ubiquitous in the Netherlands; a veritable staple of Dutch ‘cuisine'. There are a couple of types I see on supermarket shelves (although many different brands... shelves and shelves of the stuff, metres long, reaching from the floor to the ceiling) - the first being what I call the baby food apple sauce - pure mush - and the second being a more robust, chunky pulp-like consistency. Toddler, as opposed to baby food. I buy a jar from time to time, usually because it's on offer, and I like to pretend that I'd actually use it to cook with rather than end up just eating it from the jar with a big spoon. You will be unsurprised to learn that I have ended up eating it from a jar with a big spoon every time. Until now.

I had read somewhere, probably on Pinterest, that apple sauce could be used in baking as a replacement for something. Eggs. Or perhaps butter. To be honest, I have yet to find a recipe (although my search to date has only included cookies and cakes) that doesn't also include both eggs and butter along with the apple sauce, so I may need to open up my research a little wider. Perhaps to scones and pancakes...

But I did come across this little gem:

Applesauce Oatmeal Cookies from Six Sisters' Stuff

You need:

1 cup or 255g apple-sauce (Baby, not toddler version)

1 cup or 250g brown sugar (I used dark brown)

1 egg
½ cup or 120g butter, softened

2 cups or 244g GF flour

1 cup or 90g GF oatmeal

1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ground nutmeg

½ tsp ground cloves (I used 2 tsps of speculaas spices instead of the 3 different spices mentioned in the recipe, because the smell is just heavenly!)

1 cup or 175g chocolate chips (optional)

Excuse me, though - I need to recover from reading the parenthetical option of adding chocolate chips to the recipe. Optional choc chips: surely an oxymoron. :: looks at photo above :: Hmm, interesting. It appears the only moron here is me.

There are only 2 paragraphs to the directions. Or really, one paragraph and one sentence. I was so taken aback by this simplicity that I decided to preheat my oven to 190C (375F) right at the beginning when I was asked. Brevity moves us in mysterious ways.

You're asked to mix together the apple-sauce, the brown sugar, the butter and the egg. That's it. Mix together. No ‘use a marble bowl made from stone that can only be found in one rocky outcrop of the Andes'. No ‘using a wooden spoon that has been handled for no less than four generations of baking women in your family'. Which may possibly be why this happened:

I used a hand-mixer first, but El-Cheapo model that it is, it merely chopped the softened butter into teeny-tiny pieces, refusing to, you know, actually mix the ingredients together. Even my trusty wooden spoon (one generation old) wasn't capable of remedying the situation, so I just had to hope that somehow everything would come right when I added all the dry ingredients (excluding the choc chips). Or, at worst, the problem would be well hidden amongst the oats and flour.

What you can't see can't hurt you, right? The dough should be firm, we're told, so adding more flour may be an option if somehow your consistency is a little... off. After folding in the choc chips (notice it's written plain and simple in the directions. None of your namby-pamby ‘optional' here) you are invited to scoop heaping tablespoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet, and bake for 13 to 15 minutes until golden.

Let me say here that this mixture is thick and really keeps its form well. I mean really keeps its form... I made three sheet-worths of cookies. The first, as seen above, had your plain ol' spoonfuls dolloped onto the tray. They came out looking much the same shape as they went in. Cookie dollops. The second tray contained artful 'squished down by a fork' morsels, that also came out looking pretty much as they went in.

I was nearing the top of a not-so-steep learning curve by the third tray, and not only did I artfully squish the cookies with a fork, but also neatened them up a little around the edges. 

A little.

goldilocks cookies: dollops, squished, and just right

Just to let you know, this quantity of dough gives you a metric sh*t-ton of cookies. which is roughly three dozen cookies in layman's terms. They're not crunchy cookies by any means, perhaps the legacy of the apple-sauce? but they're tasty, moreish, and spice-alicious, for all that.