Dairy Free Oat & Raisin Cookies

I have been trying for weeks to create a brilliant dairy-free cookie. I’ve had tiny ones that didn’t grow and became crunchy biscuits, I have cookie-shaped cakes and had mass-spreading chocolatey disasters (which actually, are only disastrous in terms of being cookies and not at all disastrous in terms of being tasty food in my belly).

I must admit that when it comes to choosing a bag of cookies from the supermarket, oat & raisin are usually somewhere at the bottom of my list, sitting well behind anything with chocolate or nuts. These chewy, oaty delights are however, really very tasty and surely the oats are a decent, healthy carb source as well!

This recipe makes 5 huge cookies or 8-10 smallish ones.

Ingredients

• 115g dairy free spread (you could just make these with regular butter too)
• 75g light brown muscavado sugar
• 100g oats
• 75g plain flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• Flat tsp pure vanilla extract
• 75g raisins
• 2 tbsp golden syrup

1. Preheat oven to 180.

2. Cream together the sugar and butter until most of the lumps have gone.

3. Thoroughly mix in the flour, baking powder and oats. Hopefully the mixture should still be fairly dry but not too crumbly

4. Mix in the vanilla extract, golden syrup and finally the raisins. Once mixed, all the crumbliness should be gone and you should be able to make balls of mixture.

5. Flatten the balls of mixture onto a baking sheet, into discs approximately 1-1.5cm deep. Be aware they will spread outwards.

6. For smaller cookies, bake for 12-15 minutes. The outside should be browning when you take them out but they'll still feel a bit floppy until they're cooled. For larger cookies, leave in for 15-18 minutes. Don't be tempted to leave them in for too long otherwise you'll have biscuits instead of cookies!

7. Leave to cool for as long as you can. I lasted about four minutes. Try to distract yourself with licking the spoon and bowl whilst you wait.