This recipe can be made as chocolate chip cookies or raisin cookies. It is rather similar to the recipe Cliff Stoll included in his book _The Cuckoo's Egg_, except for the oatmeal. It's a bit touchy, but you can end up with some wonderful slightly soft cookies where the oatmeal almost completely disappears if you do everything just right.
4. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.
5. Blend in hot water and vanilla.
6. Add flour and remaining dry ingredients and blend well.
(I usually do this by hand, instead of using the old
sunbeam mixer, as it makes less of a mess, it's easy to
do, and mixing the cookie dough is a bit hard on the
mixer.)
7. Drop large spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheets and bake
at 375 F for 8 minutes. Note that the cookies tend to
spread quite a bit.
Note that leaving the butter out of the refrigerator to warm up beforehand makes creaming it easier for the mixer.
This recipe could easily be made with raisins instead of chocolate drops. Note on flour quantity: I use 1.75 cups of flour, rather than the 1.5 that the recipe calls for. This recipe seems to be quite sensitive to variations in the quantity of flour. I keep my flour in a large jar and pour it into the measure, while my mother (and grandmother, I suspect) keeps hers in a large tub and measures it by scooping it out. This seems to make quite a large difference in the amount of air in the flour. If you haven't enough flour, the cookies tend to be very flat, while too much flour makes for cake-ier cookies that burn on the bottom before cooking through. It's easier to add flour if you have too little, so you might want to err in that direction.
