Hume Lake Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hume Lake Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

So, today I decided to update my "About" tab for this blog, and I ended up with what I consider an excessively long piece about myself.  I don't like the focus to be on me, so I feel a little uncomfortable with that being the first thing people see if they go straight to the home page of my blog.  This is my attempt to "bury" that post, as my husband calls it.  His suggested post was a chocolate rolled ice cream cake, but after looking up a couple of recipes, I decided that there are easier ways to bury the "me" post, and so, I bring you this recipe from Hume Lake.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college (I think), I worked in the bakery at Hume Lake Christian Camp, located in the Sequoia National Forest in central California.  My first choice on my application was to be a camp counselor.  I was sooooo disappointed when I saw that I was hired for the bakery.  Seriously, in my immaturity I thought I wanted the "glory" of being a camp counselor.  Now that I have a couple of decades between me and that experience, I am so thankful that I was given the bakery assignment.  I got to work with an awesome group of people, and when my supervisors saw the passion with which I approached baking, they let me make special baked items for the restaurant they had for visitors just passing through for the day.  This is where I got to experiment with cheesecake, lemon cake (still need to do that one for this blog), cookies, pies, and scones, which I discovered are different all over the world.  I also got to work with real Hobart mixers, which was pretty cool.  Someday I hope to own a small home version of that mixer.  Sigh.
At any rate, I got to make these cookies several times while working in the bakery.  We would make the dough about a day in advance, stuff it into 5-gallon buckets, refrigerate, and slice off huge discs of dough from the bucket, then use a round biscuit cutter to cut out cookies.  I had to scale down the recipe for a normal kitchen, and I hope I did the math right.  These taste good anyway, and I'm glad I got to take this little trip down memory lane today.
Oh yeah, the cookies.  These oatmeal cookies are light and crisp and just slightly chewy in the middle.  The refrigeration of the dough is necessary to keep them from spreading and being too flat.  They're also good made with cinnamon and no chocolate chips, but I'll have to do that another day.

Hume Lake Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/3 cups oatmeal (I mix quick and old fashioned oats)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions:

In a medium bowl combine all of the dry ingredients.  In large bowl, cream sugars, butter, and shortening until light and fluffy.  Beat in egg and vanilla.   Stir dry ingredients into wet ingredients just until mixed.  Stir in chocolate chips.  Cover and refrigerate two hours to overnight.  Scoop dough into 1 to 1 1/2-inch balls onto cookie sheets.  Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes.  Allow to cool 5-10 minutes on the pan before moving to a wire rack to cool completely.  Store in an airtight container.  Only bake as many as you think will get eaten in a 48-hour period. The dough can remain in the refrigerator fora  week or so. (That's my cookie-baking philosophy, anyway.)

Makes about 3 dozen cookies.