• Raisin the Bar On Little Debbie Clones, Part I
• The Reference Design
  • Major Contributors
  • The Long Tail
  • Takeaways
• Our Core Cookie
  • OCP v. 0.1
• Let’s give it a shot
  • Round 1
  • Round 2
• Going further

When it comes to individually-wrapped commercially abundant snack cookies, Oatmeal Creme Pies hold a special place in my heart.

shelf-stable divinity, freshly extracted from its cellophane casing

There’s something delightful about the combination of oatmeal and molasses - and when paired with finest synthetic sweet fluff whatever is left over of two quarters and chemical engineering can get you, it can’t be beat. I’d love to replicate them in order to expand on the formula.

Now, I’ve tried some homemade OCP recipes before, and they’re quite good! While nothing will be a perfect simulation, they haven’t been quite what I want, so I’d like to try to find ways to replicate that magic.

Really, what I want is to find something that matches the texture of the whole package. The cookie part of the OCP is a very soft, pliable cookie, crackly on top, with a chewy texture to complement the creme inside. The homemade recipes I’ve seen and tried don’t end up soft enough, or use whole rolled or flaked oats in the recipe. Look, do you see any hint of non-obliterated oat bits in that cookie? Of course not!

(no, that speck on the left side of the picture doesn’t count)

Some folks will say they like the whole oated-versions better. That’s fine. Good for you. You won’t find me saying those cookies are bad! They’re just not what I’m looking for.

Some more faithful recipes have you food-process the oats. But it’s still not quite perfect. Maybe I just overbaked these in the past, but I’ve already written a few paragraph to convince myself to develop my own recipe, so here we are.

Eventually, I’d also like to see if there’s ways to take the cookie and bring in more intense flavors. Can you make them more oaty, more molassesy, more spicy? Is it possible to modify them in different ways - a la Peanut Butter Creme Pies or Fudge Rounds?

This’ll be something I try to crack for a while. To start, let’s just play around with oat-molasses cookies to try and get some the basics down. If you would like in on the artifacts of the cookie development process, your time is now. Take a look over here.

For this post, I’ll come up with some ideas and made some very small batches (like 3 each), and try an iteration with some fiddling to see how the cookies change.

The Reference Design

I guess the first thing to do to get started is try to see what they actually put in the cookies today, for uh, inspiration.

stares at label

This may be a challenge.

Major Contributors

Unfortunately, the culinary secret keepers at Debra’s Cookie Enterprises don’t have separate lists for the creme and the cookie.

Despite that, I’d say there’s not too much crazy going on in the main set of ingredients:

Ingredient	Comment
corn syrup	I’m assuming this is in both the creme and the cookie.
enriched bleached flour	Yup, it’s corpo-flour.
palm and soybean oils	One of these (palm) is solid at room temp, the other isn’t.
sugar	No comment necessary.
whole grain rolled oats	Cool.
water	Gotta stay hydrated.
dextrose	More sugar!
molasses	Well I’d hope!
raisin paste	????????

Most of these are kinds of givens or at least not unexpected. Flour, Oats, Molasses, Sugar, other sugar, other sugar, and oils.

But: raisin paste? Thinking on it, it makes a lot of sense. It’s not easily identifiable but there is a bit of raisinyness in the cookie, and it’s established science that oatmeal raisin is objectively the best cookie, so it’s only natural than an OCP is oatmeal raisin.

The Long Tail

There’s a whole lot of words past the CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF EACH OF THE FOLLOWING disclaimer, probably to justify the food scientists’ payroll:

soy flour, leavening (baking soda, ammonium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum phosphate), whey, salt, soy lecithin, corn starch, caramel color, mono- and diglycerides, sorbitan monostearate, polysorbate 60, eggs, palm and palm kernel oil, egg whites, yellow 5, red 40, blue 1, titanium dioxide, turmeric, annatto extract, beta carotene, cocoa processed with alkali, high fructose corn syrup, rice flour, nonfat dry milk, modified corn starch, datem, modified tapioca starch, carrageenan, sorbic acid (to preserve freshness), spices, natural and artificial flavors, citric acid, malic acid, propylene glycol monostearate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, polysorbate 80, pectin, sodium citrate, modified wheat starch, chocolate, cocoa butter.

Let’s sort these into presumed major functional impact. It’s not really possible to break things down entirely in this way, as any thing you add has some impact on texture and flavor. But as a rough categorization, I got:

Category	List	Comment
flours + starches	soy flour, corn starch, modified tapioca starch, modified corn starch, rice flour, modified wheat starch	Starches are a pretty common “soft cookie” ingredient, so it’s comforting to see them show up here, even if there are so many.
sugars	high fructose corn syrup	The American standard.
flavorings	salt, whey (maybe this goes here?), cocoa processed with alkali, nonfat dry milk, spices, natural and artificial flavors, chocolate	Chocolate and cocoa are nice to know about! Though when it comes to spices, it seems like we’ll be figuring most of it out ourselves.
raising agent	leavening (baking soda, ammonium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum phosphate), citric acid, malic acid	Nothing too groundbreaking here.
oils	palm and palm kernel oil, cocoa butter	yawn
emulsifiers	soy lecithin, mono- and diglycerides, sorbitan monostearate, polysorbate 60, polysorbate 80, eggs and egg whites, datem, carrageenan, propylene glycol monostearate, pectin, sodium citrate	Oh man, they really spent a lot of time and syllables on the texture that goes into this cookie. Some of these are probably just for the creme - like the pectin, carageenan, and maybe sodium citrate? But this is frankly just intimidating. I’m gonna ignore this and hope things mostly work out.
color	caramel color, the primary artificial colors, titanium dioxide, turmeric, annato extract, beta carotene	Even more artificial coloring than I expected, to be honest.
preservation	sorbic acid (to preserve freshness), sodium stearoyl lactylate	While not using these, I salute these workhorses for their wonderous properties of mummization.

Takeaways

What did I learn here?

• I should add raisin paste to our cookie grist - I think this will turn out to be a major benefit!
• Oils: There seem to be both solid and liquid oils in the normal cookie, so it’ll be good to start with something similar.
• A bit of cocoa in the spice mix is something nice to confirm. But this will likely be easist to tweak after finding a good recipe.
• The world of commercial emulsifiers is expansive and I’m scared of clicking those wiki links I embedded.

Our Core Cookie

So, it’s time to throw some darts at the wall and pin down a first set of ingredients and ratios.

• oat flour, corn starch - no regular flour. What can I say, I like oats.
  • I will probably try some with some regular flour at some point.
• white sugar, corn syrup, molasses
• refined coconut oil, grapeseed oil - representing the mild solid and liquid oil categories.
• egg OR applesauce
• baking soda and/or baking powder - starting with some of both.
• spices - mace, cinnamon, clove, and cocoa powder. Possibility to expand this blend later.
• raisin paste - I made this by taking some raisins, processing them in some water, and cooking the slurry a bit to thicken. (8 oz raisins to 2 oz water in the food processor).

With regards to ratios, let’s start with for a 1:1:2 net oil - sugar - flour radio, and just use standard “cookie recipe” amounts for everything else. Oh yeah, and I’ll just guess on the amount of raisin paste to add.

Here we go - For about 2 dozen cookies (projected):

OCP v. 0.1

You’ll note there’s 2 versions of the base recipe - one with egg and one with applesauce. I picked applesauce since of the egg substitutes in the PB cookies, applesauce produced the cookie that ended up closer to an OCP in consistency and chewiness.

Let’s give it a shot

Below is the report/account of trying this recipe.

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For testing, I made (as close as I could measure 1/8 recipes - so 3 cookies). If you’ve ever tried to use a stand mixer with a half recipe of anything, you know it doesn’t work. So hand mixing it is.

Round 1

After mixing, both cookies were quite soft (with the applesauce slightly softer).

Here’s how they looked going in:

And out the oven:

Initial thoughts were:

1. Hey, I came up with a cookie recipe that worked and made a cookie!
2. These are, actually not bad!
3. The cookies spread out some and didn’t melt entirely! (I was pretty worried about this given the syrups/etc.)

Let’s see how these looked these to the golden heavily artificially colored standard, in Egg - OCP - Applesauce cookie order:

Roughly the right shape, lacking in crackles

Egg, OCP, Applesauce internals

And here’s how the cookies compared:

1. First: Both of my versions produced very smooth tops, which are much less visually impressive than the OCP.
2. The cookies as currently portioned are a little bigger than the OCP cookie by mass, probably. The egg one kept a bit more structure, but the applesauce one is very close in terms of thickness.
3. The egg cookie was the “cakiest” of the bunch, but both cookies didn’t really stand up to the chewiness the real OCP brought to the table. That’s something I’ll need to work on.
4. Both of my cookies were way spicer than the OCP. I’m ok with that.
5. Warm, my cookies were similarly soft, but as they cooled, they got a bit harder than the OCP. The bake time’s already quite short though.
6. All 3 cookies had molasses present in a satisfying amount, my cookies probably had a bit stronger molasses and oat. I couldn’t quite pick out the raisins in my cookies.

Round 2

Armed with those notes and an iPhone, I hastily looked up some things to try in a second quick-turn batch of cookies to see how different they’d turn out. I ended up trying these 3 things, all at once.

1. Double the raisin paste. (raisinyness, also probably softness)
2. Lower the temperature to 325. (softness)
3. Roll the cookies in sugar before baking (crackliness?)

Yes, yes, it’d be better to change all these things independently. Maybe eventually.

With those changes, here’s how the next set turned out (egg on the left, applesauce on the right):

Oblique view of all 3 (applesauce on left, egg on right). They certainly match well in color!

So I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but due to the added wetness and lower bake time, it looks like these cookies ended up a bit flatter. My experiment with rolling the cookies in sugar did basically nothing as far as I can tell. That said, this cookie batter was quite goopy to start with.

Notes on how these bad boys did:

1. Texture’s still not quite where I want them to be. Applesauce one is very similar to the last, egg one is much less cake-like, though still the cakiest.
2. No cracks to be seen still.
3. The raisins are there now :)
4. The cookies are suitable soft now, for the most part, but not chewy enough. I’ll need to do some research on how to do this.

Going further

I think the recipe with modifications is good, and I’ll continue to derive new changes from that recipe going forward. I actually think using applesauce instead of eggs is more promising at this top. These are some options:

For crackly tops, mostly:

• probably most important Chill the dough before rolling in sugar
• Mess with the baking powder/soda formua and proportions

For chewiness, mostly:

• Play with the flour ratios (corn starch/oat flour)
• Try some with regular flour
• Even more raisin paste (Start subbing out some corn syrup probably).
• Mess with the oil ratios (100% coconut? 100% grapeseed?)