Granola Grabbers

This week's TWD recipe was selected by Michelle of Bad Girl Baking. I bought two kinds of granola, Mona's and Kellogg's, figuring I'd use whichever one I liked better in the recipe.


I suspect that Mona's is much more authentic, and would probably be preferred by true outdoorsmen, but I am an inside girl and I liked the Kellogg's better. Kellogg's was clumpier than Mona's -- the recipe said to break up large clumps by hand, but there was no way that those bad boys were coming apart by hand. So I broke out my faithful rolling pin and let the marble do the work:


This is a great recipe to make with small kids. It contains small quantities of many different dry ingredients, so kids can help with pouring everything into the bowl and mixing things together.



Things were humming along nicely when I got to the butter creaming part. I am not the best planner in the world. You can pretty much bet that any butter that I need for a recipe will be in the freezer when I need it. This one called for room temperature butter, so I decided to defrost it in the microwave 10 seconds at a time. But I got cocky at one point and went for 20 seconds, and this is what I got:


That would be melted butter, not room temperature butter. I just kept thinking about my friend Julie's wise words: "disasters are much more interesting." I thought long and hard about just using the melted butter, but since this is my first TWD recipe, I decided to do the right thing and start over with new butter.
I snuck a taste of the batter -- so good!



And the finished product:


I love these cookies. I was amazed that I could so thoroughly love a cookie that contains ingredients that I don't ordinarily like on their own, such as wheat germ and coconut. Some cookies are at their best warm, right out of the oven -- chocolate chip being the classic example. But I think these cookies are best the next day, once they are thoroughly cooled and set up. My husband wanted me to add that they go really well with beer, thanks to the peanuts. A cookie that is equally at home whether it is accompanied by milk or beer. We can call off the search; we have found the perfect cookie.