Applesauce Oat Craisin Cookies

Some of the greatest inventions and discoveries were made by pure chance or came about through an egregious error or miscommunication.  These cookies are not a good example of that (or of good photography, perhaps I should consider getting a digital camera and giving my sidekick a rest?).

After having sampled the wares at The Wedge, my local co-op, I decided that it would be much more cost effective (and fun!) to simply make my own vegan cookies!  I was so excited at the prospect of homemades that I spent a few days gathering a few simple yet diverse recipes for experimentation.  I didn't want to get involved with anything too complex being that my friend Jamie spooked me on the baking tip with all of her accuracy banter and what not.  Accordingly I am convinced that I will only ever FAIL at baking.  Evidently, that's not quite true although it would be a stretch to say that I succeeded.  In my haste to make these cookies and then devour them I made one very important mistake:  I tried to make oatmeal cookies with oats.  Oops.  Unfortunately, I didn't quite realize this until I was already mixing together all of the ingredients and marveling at how this strange, gooey material was going to turn into the beautiful cookies I saw online... but they weren't going to do anything like that at all.

Aside from my temporary lapse in sanity, I followed the recipe just as it was presented here. Other than using oats instead of oatmeal, one of the executive decisions I made was to use equal amounts of oats and flour whereas the recipe states that you can roll with either 3c. oatmeal and 1c. whole wheat flour or 2c. of each.  Another cool option this recipe presented was to reduce the amount of sugar from 1c. to whatever your tastes may be, so I opted to move forward with about 3/4c. and the cookies were still plenty sweet so maybe even less next time?  I also elected to let mine bake a bit longer in hopes of producing a more cohesive cookie and I think the effect was achieved by leaning closer to 25 minutes at 350 degrees than 22 minutes.

Miraculously, my oat cookies actually taste pretty good!  Though I'd imagine the oatmeal variety is much more palatable, I'd have to assume that mine are somehow healthier... maybe?  Anyhow, Faint liked them... for whatever that's worth?