These chewy butterscotch oatmeal cookies are filled with toasted hazelnuts and strong espresso. A quick and easy recipe, they make great freezer cookies--perfect for baking off at a moment's notice.

Us recipe developers work weird food schedules. For the blog, I try to create and plan content a month ahead, but for client work, it’s often farther in advance. This is how I found myself making Thanksgiving dinner at the end of September this year. I had a client project for a full Thanksgiving feast—turkey, stuffing, mac and cheese…the works, due at the beginning of October. For the weeks leading up to the shoot, I spent quite a bit of time on the phone with grocery stores trying to locate a turkey (fun fact, most grocery stores won’t get turkeys in stock until “closer to the holiday”, though they won’t tell you when exactly that will be and lots of meat managers are really not huge fans of people calling and asking about them). After finally securing myself an out-of-season turkey, I began to work on my full Thanksgiving dinner, a project that would leave me with somewhere close to a million pounds of leftovers that I really didn’t want.

So we threw a party. We celebrated Thanksgiving in early October with a group of friends who brought bonus sides and desserts pot-luck style. It was the first party we’ve hosted since moving to Minnesota and it was such a fun night, though I am officially turkey-ed out for the year. I’ll be eating spicy noodles or something completely different this year on actual Thanksgiving and I’ll be giving thanks for not having to cook a turkey twice in two months.

oatmeal cookies with butterscotch, hazelnuts, and espresso

I had this flavor idea swimming around in my head for a few weeks and decided to make a batch to go with our Thanksgiving party food so I could test them out on a group and they were a real hit. Think of them as classic oatmeal cookies with a bit of a grown-up twist.

I have three nonnegotiables when it comes to oatmeal cookies: 1) they should have crunchy edges 2) they should have soft, pillowy middles and 3) they should have a deep brown sugar flavor. These cookies hit all three and more.

I love steeping flavors into the butter for my cookies so this time we added instant espresso to our melted butter as the base of flavor. It’s then mixed with lots of brown sugar and sugar, eggs, vanilla, and dry ingredients (flour, oats, leavening agents, and salt). So easy. A bunch of toasted hazelnuts and butterscotch chips round it out and then they are chilled slightly before baking. Side note: this cookie dough smells AMAZING. My whole kitchen smelled like a tiny little coffee shop or the smell of the hazelnut coffee from Panera Bread.

When baking these cookies, take extra care not to over-bake so you don’t lose your soft, pillowy centers. I found that 8 minutes, tapping the tray on the counter, and then another 2-3 minutes worked perfectly in my oven. The centers will look underdone, but let the cookies cool completely on the pan and they will set up. Like most cookie recipes, this cookie dough freezes beautifully so that you can bake some off and have warm oatmeal cookies within 15 minutes.