No Bake Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

Are you looking for quick, easy, delicious cookies to make without using your oven? Look no further! These cookies take about ten minutes to make (not including set time), they taste great, need no special ingredients, and won't add extra heat to your house which is great during summer months.

While most recipes for these cookies found online are for full batches, I find that making a half batch improves the overall consistency of these tasty treats, so this recipe is the half batch that I use.

What do you need?                                                          

• 1/4 cup of milk
• 1/2 stick of butter
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1.5 tbsp cocoa powder
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 generous cup of oatmeal
• 1/4 cup of peanut butter
• parchment paper
• 1 medium sauce pan
• 1 mixing spoon
• 1 metal spoon
• measuring spoons
• 1 mixing bowl 
• a timer 

What should you do?

Melt the butter in the sauce pan with the milk, on low-medium heat. While this is melting, you can prepare your other ingredients, and make sure the parchment paper is laid out and ready for the cookies.

I prefer to use the mixing bowl to hold the oats until you need them. They're already measured out that way, and ready to go. The metal spoon used to scoop out the peanut butter - make sure you hang on to that. You'll need it later.

Once the butter is thoroughly melted and mixed with the milk, add in the sugar, vanilla, and cocoa powder.




Mix well, then turn up the heat to medium-high to let the mix boil.

This is where the timer becomes important. Once it starts to boil, you need to start the timer, and only let the mix boil for one minute. If you don't boil it long enough, your cookies won't set up, and they will stay runny. If you over boil it, the cookies will get dry and crumbly.

While neither of these things are wrong for home eating, having runny or crumbly cookies at a gathering may not be very appealing.

Immediately after the one minute of boiling ends, remove the pan from the heat and add in the oatmeal and peanut butter, mixing thoroughly.

Once everything is mixed and the peanut butter melts smoothly, place spoonfuls of the mix onto the parchment paper to set up. If you boiled properly, the mixture should begin to thicken by the time you're done spooning it onto the parchment paper. Within 15-20 minutes, they should be firm enough to pick up (though they will still be warm). However if you want to wait to enjoy the cookies until they're cooled, you can always lick the spoon! Make sure it's cooled down first though.