For many of us, the holidays can make us nostalgic. It’s the perfect time of year to reminisce about family, friends, past holiday celebrations and favorite joyful traditions. Over the years as we grow and change, we forge new festive practices with our nearest and dearest, but we also hang on to certain tried and true ones, some of which involve favorite recipes. It’s wonderful to be able to enjoy something our grandmother made us with our own children. But it’s not just about the food; it’s about sharing the story that goes along with it.

I’ll be baking cookies later this week — something I do during the holidays every year. For the past few years, I’ve gone over to my neighbor Vicki’s house and we’ve whipped up at least four cookie varieties. Her ginger molasses cookies are now a holiday staple for me. This year, my twin, one of our childhood friends and I are getting together. We won’t have a lot of time, so we’ve settled on only two types of cookies: my chocolate chip recipe and my sister’s pecan shortbread cookies.

Shortly after we’d made the plans for the mini bake-a-thon, I had a flashback to one of our first times in the kitchen together — it wasn’t at either of our homes, though; it was at school. It was near the holidays and we were “baking” cookies during class — I’ve put that in quotes because we weren’t actually baking. We were making those “no bake” chocolate and oatmeal cookies that are sort of like a fudge/cookie hybrid. I hadn’t thought about that in years. And it’d been even longer since I’d prepared those particular cookies. So of course, that meant I had to make them. Never mind the fact that I probably didn’t have the ingredients on hand and most certainly didn’t have the recipe.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in this blog, I like to wing it — whether it’s cooking, baking or crafting — if there’s something I want to make, I just get to it. So, with an ancient, happy memory of chocolate, peanut butter, quick-cooking oats and lots of laughter, I started rooting around my pantry. The good news is that I almost always have a few baking staples on hand, so I knew I had the sugar, butter, cocoa and vanilla I’d need. And what’s a kitchen without milk and peanut butter? The stumper was the quick-cooking oats. I remember the canister with a certain famous white-haired, black-capped gentleman on the front sitting on the classroom countertop like it was yesterday. I also remember one of our fellow students eating a handful of those dry oats on a dare; he ended up coughing them all over another classmate. Gross, but hilarious. Sadly, I had no smiling-faced canister in my cupboard. But, I did have a box of instant oatmeal packets — maple brown sugar flavored.

Cookie ingredients (photo courtesy K. Neer)

Here’s the recipe I concocted from memory:

• 1 stick + 2 tbsp of unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (slightly heaping, not level)
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 1/3 cup milk
• 4 rounded tablespoons peanut butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
• 8 packets of instant oatmeal (I had 6 maple brown sugar and 2 plain)

Making the chocolate base (photo courtesy K. Neer)

First, I ripped open the eight packets of oatmeal and, lucky for me, the contents were clumpy so I was able to remove some of the maple brown sugar flavoring from the oats. Then I melted the butter in a medium-sized saucepan and stirred in the sugar, cocoa, espresso powder and milk. I turned up the heat until the mixture started to bubble around the edges and then turned the heat off and added the peanut butter, one spoonful at a time until it was fully incorporated, followed by the vanilla. After another good stir to make sure there weren’t any clumps, I dumped the oatmeal in the chocolate and stirred some more. I used a small cookie scoop to ration out the mixture onto wax paper, spreading it out a bit so the cookies would cool flat.

Adding the oatmeal (photo courtesy K. Neer)

I don’t think we put espresso powder in that original batch so many years ago, but I like to put either cinnamon or coffee in chocolaty things and I was hoping it might offset the maple-brown-sugar flavor. FYI, it worked! Next time nostalgia hits and I revisit this recipe, I think I’ll attempt a more adult version — using Nutella instead of the peanut butter, special dark cocoa instead of regular, sticking with the espresso add-in and making sure I have regular oats on hand instead of already flavored instant oatmeal. Hmm…and maybe adding in a few pistachios or maybe some coconut.

Cookie scoops like these are super handy! (photo courtesy K. Neer)

Do you have any favorite holiday recipes to share? We’d love to see them. And don’t forget to follow How-to Stuff on Facebook and Twitter.