Ultimate Oatmeal Cookie - 12 Days Of Cookies
Blind Dog Café's ultimate oatmeal cookie
This is the seventh in our monthlong series, 12 Days of Cookies, featuring classic and inventive recipes from across the country.
We've mulled wine, pierced clementines with cloves, and decked the halls with cinnamon pinecones. But this year, the most aromatic Christmas spices are coming from our cookie sheet.
At Blind Dog Café, baker Greer Gilchrist captures the wintry mix of cardamom, cinnamon, clove and ginger in her seemingly simple Cinnamon Chai Oatmeal Cookies ($2; see the recipe).
Inspired by her dad's love of oatmeal cookies, Gilchrist stirs black-tea leaves into her batter. As they bake, the leaves infuse each densely moist round with the ideal kick of classic baking spices, and fill the kitchen with heady drafts of cinnamon.
A sucker for anything cinnamon-, pumpkin- or eggnog-spiced, Gilchrist's pastry counter at the café is a winter wonderland of fluffy pumpkin muffins, cinnamon-walnut bread and cinnamon scones, not to mention her gooey milk-and-dark-chocolate cookies ($2). But her chai recipe is the homiest taste of the season.
Serve the cookies after Christmas dinner, with warm milk, glasses of Port or brandy. Needless to say, the cookies also go quite well with mugs of hot, milky chai tea.
The Blind Dog Café, 944 Florida Ave. NW (at W St.); 202-290-2865 or blinddogcafe.com