Cooked Oatmeal Coffeecake

• Cooked oatmeal lends a chewy-to-gooey texture to baked goods. The recycling of cooked oatmeal into secondary dishes has even made its way into cooking classes led by caterers and professional chefs, who sometimes add leftover oatmeal to spice cake with pecans and caramelized apples. Home cook Eva Felis of the 1 Big Bite website notes that cooked oatmeal is a flexible central ingredient that can be combined with shredded carrots, ginger and other healthy ingredients.

Contrasting Textures

• Depending on the recipe you use, adding cooked oatmeal to a coffeecake can result in a product that is crispy on top yet soft and moist inside. Some cooks serve what they call porridge cakes with dollops of yogurt or cream at tea time. Robin Sue Joss of the Big Red Kitchen tops her "almost gooey" oatmeal cake with the contrasting crunch of shredded coconut and chopped pecans.

Other Uses for Cooked Oatmeal

• Farmers and urban homesteaders don't like to waste food. Some feed leftover oatmeal to chickens and pigs. But the owners of the Beekman 1802 farm in Sharon Springs, New York -- who star in a Cooking Channel TV show called "The Fabulous Beekman Boys" -- discovered that cooked oatmeal also makes tasty "cakies," which are a sconelike cross between cake and cookies. Orange zest and chocolate chips are optional ingredients they suggest. Cooked oatmeal also is a good addition to pancakes.

Kinds of Oats for Coffeecake

• Cooked oatmeal in many forms can be used in coffeecake and other baked goods. The grain is first refined into whole-kernel groats that are steel-cut or rolled. While rolled oats are the kind that are chopped up for use in instant oatmeal, steel-cut oats are chewier flakes of whole oats.