Morning granola gets sweet upgrade
I’d never object to eating a regular cookie for breakfast. But I’d always thought a breakfast cookie for dessert would make me sad.
Packed with good-foryou ingredients such as whole grains, nuts and seeds, a breakfast cookie is meant to be healthful and substantial, something to fill an empty belly rather than a whimsical sweet to tempt a full one.
Then I brought home some breakfast cookies from Frenchette Bakery in New York, and I saw that I was wrong.
Decidedly not dainty, the cookies were saucersize pucks — craggy with oats and seeds, flecked with coconut and chewy from dried cherries. Their centers were soft and yielding, but the edges crisped delightfully.
Satisfying but not heavy, the first one was perfect for breakfast, dunked into my tea. Then I nibbled on another throughout the afternoon, finally finishing it after dinner, when it made a not-too-sweet dessert along the lines of oatmeal raisin cookies, but with a deep almond flavor from the nut butter mixed into the dough.
And if they were a little more wholesome than our usual after-dinner treats, then all the better for me and my family. Keeping a supply around the house seemed like a very smart thing to do.
So, I emailed the bakery for the recipe, which was a collaboration between Michelle Palazzo, the pastry chef, and Peter Edris, the head baker.
It turned out to be both gluten-free and highly adaptable. You can take the basic formula and play with it, substituting raisins for cherries or peanut butter for almond butter, Edris told me.
“It’s a lot like granola,” he said. “Sometimes, in the morning, after the cookies come out of the oven, I’ll crumble them into milk and eat them like cereal.”
Since I adored the cookies as they were, I left the recipe pretty much alone. My only tweak was pressing the dough into a 9-inch square pan to make bars. It was slightly easier than forming individual cookies, and I liked the softer texture they took on. The bars will also stay fresh a little longer, up to a week rather than a few days.
But then again, since they’re just so easy to snack on from breakfast to bedtime, their keeping qualities may be beside the point.
Breakfast bars with oats and coconut
DAVID MALOSH/THE NEW YORK TIMES