Home on the Range: Gesine Bullock-Prado's Oat Crisp Cookies

Oat crisp cookie Credit: Raymond G. Prado

Gesine Bullock-Prado‘s new cookbook, My Vermont Table: Recipes for All (Six) Seasons, celebrates many of the pastry chef and baking teacher’s favorite ingredients, including, naturally, maple syrup.

She shared her love of Vermont and its six seasons recently with Seven Days while the sap buckets filled in her White River Junction backyard. These delicate, crisp cookies are a perfect way to honor this “extra” Vermont season, which Bullock-Prado has dubbed mud/sugaring season.

Oat Crisp Cookies

Yield: About 4 dozen

Bullock-Prado writes, “These cookies are my kind of overnight oats: oats coated in butter and sugar, overnight, so that they soak up all that yummy goodness. These lacy cookies are just the right amount of buttery and crisp to serve alongside a fruity ice cream.”

My Vermont Table Credit: Countryman Press

Ingredients

1/2 pound (2 sticks; 226 grams) unsalted butter, melted
1 1/2 cups (319 grams) light brown sugar
2 1/4 cups (200 grams) old-fashioned rolled oats (not quick-cooking or steel-cut oats)
1/4 cup (30 grams) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon pure maple syrup
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste*
1/2 teaspoon fine salt

Directions

Combine the butter and brown sugar in a large bowl and stir well. Add the oats and stir. Make sure the oats are completely coated. Cover with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature overnight.
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Line a half sheet pan with parchment. Set aside.
Stir the flour, maple syrup, egg, vanilla bean paste and salt into the oat mixture.
Drop teaspoon-size mounds a few inches apart onto the prepared sheet pan (the cookies really spread). Bake for 5 to 6 minutes, until the cookies just begin to brown around the edges.
Remove from the oven and allow the cookies to cool for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack, using a flexible flat spatula (a fish spatula works really well for this).

*You can substitute vanilla extract.