Welcome back to Recipes for the Kitchen-Impaired! This is the first week of doing some Henriksen Family Recipes! These are great treats and meals that Dan grew up with, and he still loves them, so you will too! This week we’re tackling a simple yet somewhat unconventional style of cookie: the Chocolate No-Bake Cookie!

Here’s the stuff you’ll need!

Start by separating the ingredients into two mixtures:

Dry Mixture (In a large mixing bowl):
4 cups (1-minute/instant) Oats
1/2 cup Peanut Butter
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
A pinch of Salt

and Liquid Mixture (in a pot for the stovetop):
2 cups Sugar
1/2 cups Water
3 tablespoons Cocoa Powder
1 Cube of Butter (or Margarine)

Put the liquid mix pot over medium heat, stir the ingredients as it begins to boil/bubble, and once the butter is all melted and everything is silky smooth (should be about 1 minute at a bubbling boil), remove it from heat.

Next, mix up the dry ingredients until the oats are pretty well salted/vanilla-ed/peanut butter-ed (don’t break your back over it right now, though, it’ll get easier when you add the liquid mix).

Then, you guessed it, pour in the liquid mix! Use a spatula, spoon or something big enough to pretty easily mix everything around, and not melt from the liquid’s heat. Make sure you scoop all around the bowl, so that no stray oats are left without a chocolatey coating.

Now, scoop up small balls of the mix and plop them onto aluminum foil or wax paper. You can use a teaspoon, a regular spoon, or a super cool cookie scoop like we have (I recommend that if you can find one, the more spherical they are, the better. But as with most baked goods, they still taste great even if they look weird).

And then you just let them stand for 3 hours! By then they’ll have set and become firm, and you can gobble them right up! (Like we did, too quickly for me to remember to take a final picture! Sorry! They basically look the same, just firmer and less shiny.) We hope you’ve enjoyed this week in Henriksen Family Recipes on Recipes for the Kitchen-Impaired! As always, you can shoot me an email at danhenriksen@fluffy-muffin.com with any feedback or questions, or ideas for future recipes! See you next week!