Cranberry-Coconut Oatmeal Cookies

You'll want to add these Cranberry-Coconut Oatmeal Cookies to your holiday cookie lineup. Fiber-rich oats become chewy and tender yet crisp around the edges—the perfect cookie combo. Dried cranberries add a sweet-tangy pop, while nutty coconut becomes toasty and even more flavorful. Keep reading for our expert tips, including how to get the perfect chewy texture for your cookies.

Tips from the EatingWell Test Kitchen

These are the key tips we learned while developing and testing this recipe in our Test Kitchen to make sure it works, tastes great and is good for you too! 

• People with celiac disease or gluten sensitivity should use oats labeled "gluten-free," as oats are often cross-contaminated with wheat and barley.
• To achieve the best results with your cookies, avoid overmixing the dough, which can lead to stiff and hard cookies instead of chewy ones. Similarly, be careful not to overcook them, or they will become dry.
• Make sure all your ingredients are at the same temperature, typically room temperature, before mixing.
• We recommend portioning out the dough using a teaspoon. Keeping the cookie sizes uniform will ensure they bake evenly. Additionally, space the cookies 1 ½ inches apart to prevent them from becoming one big unified cookie.

Nutrition Notes

• The foundation of these cookies, oats provide fiber, antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. Regularly eating oats has been linked to lower cholesterol and can help manage blood sugar. The fiber in oats can also contribute to a healthy, happy gut by keeping things moving through it and feeding your beneficial gut bacteria. You also get some plant-based protein and iron in oats.

Dried Cranberries Bring Tang to Some Traditional Holiday Cookies

For many Americans, baking is very much a part of the holiday season. Those from the Caribbean regions have their rum-infused black cake or Christmas cake. Those from northern European traditions have a range of cookies. For many African Americans, it's about pies or even a gargantuan bounty of baked goods. My family was the exception. None of us were real sweets eaters, and, with only three of us, it just didn't make sense to go all-out. Therefore, I don't crave the heavy desserts that are for many a part of the season.

Rather, when I think of the Christmas holidays, I think of the oatmeal cookies that my mother and I would invariably make. Unlike the oatmeal cookies that are for sale in many places these days, these cookies were not chewy, but were thin, crisp and crunchy. Several years ago, I resurrected my mother's old Fannie Farmer cookbook and tried my hand at our holiday recipe.

The cookies were as remembered, but being me, I could not resist the temptation to play around with the recipe. I confess, I am an inveterate recipe fiddler and always am ringing in the changes even with my old favorites. I add a bit of this and a dash of that and come up with something that is different. And so, I went to work on the oatmeal cookies on a cool day this past fall while I was in my kitchen on Martha's Vineyard.

I started with my basic recipe but found myself also adding coconut flakes. Then, as I was looking around, I saw some dried cranberries that I keep around for snacking and for throwing into salads. I minced them up and added them to the cookie dough. What the cookies lost in crispness from the addition of the cranberries they gained in taste with the chewy tang of the berries nicely counterpointing the crunch of the oats and coconut. For the holiday season, I'm going to bake all my variants of the cookies and have them on hand to share with friends. They'll be surprised to see me eating sweets, but hopefully they'll enjoy them as much as I do.