Many oatmeal cookies are dry, cakey, and overly spiced. To make this dense and chewy, I combined unsaturated fat (vegetable oil) and saturated fat (butter) in a ratio of nearly 3 to 1, and reduced the proportion of flour. Adding an extra egg yolk boosts moistness and richness, while a touch more salt than most recipes call for tempers the sweetness and complements the oaty flavor. Most recipes call for using a stand mixer, but I found this counterproductive to the goal of chewy, dense cookies because the mixer beats air into the dough. Instead I make the dough by hand, melting the butter for easier mixing. Browning the butter delivers more complexity, and blooming a small amount of cinnamon in the butter rounds out its flavour.

Blooming Your Spices

When it comes to baking, most of us just whisk ground spices into the dry ingredients without a second thought. But there is another way: the spice-blooming technique.

Heating the spices in butter works well because the flavor compounds in certain spices are fat-soluble. That means that hot fat (oil or butter, usually) will extract those compounds, flavoring the fat. This well-flavored fat can then be dispersed throughout a dish better than a teaspoon of dry, crushed spices can.