No one can resist the temptation of a freshly baked, ooey, gooey, buttery soft cookie...NO ONE! Get ready to fill your kitchen and house with the most amazing aroma with these White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies! It literally does not get any better than this, folks. Warm, soft white chocolate cookies full of crunchy, sweet macadamia nuts so good you will have your grandmother shedding tears over your newfound master baking skills! Get ready to put the "ooh-eee, ooh-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla, bing-bang" in these cookies so good even the Witch Doctor said I shouldn't share the recipe! Promise to make a double, even triple, batch to keep the voodoo hex off me....Let's get cooking!
Everyone that knows me is well aware of the fact that I really don't enjoy baking very much. You have to be much more precise with ingredient measurements and no one knows the difference between baking soda and powder and the dislike list goes on and on. Well, once in a blue moon I can make an exception, especially when it comes to my favorite treats! Alas, I digress, but just keep in mind some of these anti-baking rants so you don't make any mistakes and ruin the most wonderful cookie dough in the entire universe. I will come to your house and make you suffer! Now that the formalities are out of the way, let's get started.
For this cookie walk through I am going to refer to and use a stand mixer because I'm lazy and wanted to minimize my baking experience, but it can obviously be done in a normal mixing bowl by hand or using a hand mixer. To begin, add the softened butter and both brown and white sugar. Mix this until well combined and "creamed" as those fancy baking people refer to it. If you are like most people, you probably have salted butter in the fridge so go ahead and use it without worry. If you are an actual baker of sorts, feel free to use your unsalted butter that we will just add salt in for later so use whichever you have on hand!
Now add the egg and vanilla extract. If you suck at cracking eggs, do it over a separate bowl then add it because no one likes cookies and egg shells, just sayin! Pro Tip.....You are far less likely to get shell in whatever you adding eggs to if you crack the egg on a flat surface instead of the edge of a bowl or counter. Don't ask me why, it's just science.
That little bit of liquid from the eggs and vanilla should have things looking a bit more like batter at this point. Now we are going to add the "dry" ingredients and mix things just enough to combine but not over work the dough and create a bunch of excess gluten. We want soft cookies after it's all said and done, right? So add the flour and baking powder (NOT BAKING SODA) and give it mix for a minute or two. If you started with unsalted butter, go ahead an add 1/4 teaspoon of salt as well. Fun fact...salted butter contains about 1/4 teaspoon of salt per stick, and this recipe conveniently uses 1 stick AKA 1/2 cup per batch so both salted or unsalted butter with 1/4 teaspoon of salt works perfectly in this recipe. Mind blowing, eh?
At this point we would have a pretty tasty cookie as is, but we need to make them over the top smack yo momma delish so add the white chocolate chips and macadamia nuts. Mix the dough for a minute or two to get everything evenly distributed and shut 'er down, folks!
Now it's time for the most difficult part of this entire cookie recipe. Transfer the dough over to a sealable bowl/container and refrigerate it for a couple hours to harden up. Why is that so difficult you may be asking? Well, you tell me how many scoops you end up eating raw before it makes it to the fridge! Yeah there is raw egg in there but who gives a damn.....this dough is mega tasty! A risk I will take every time. You have to test things out, right? But for real, it does need to stiffen up to prevent the dough from running completely flat during baking so don't skip this step.
After the dough painstakingly hangs out in the fridge for a while, scoop it into 12 equal portions and space them out on a lined baking tray. I happened to have a fancy cookie scoop and silicon liner for this step so it went fairly smooth, especially with a few more additional taste tests along the way! Oh, you probably should preheat your oven to 320 degrees Fahrenheit during this process as well.
Once your oven is up to temp, slide the tray in a set a timer for 12 minutes. The cookies should be done somewhere between 12-14 minutes so I aimed for 13 figuring it took me about 30 seconds to set the timer and another 30 to get my lazy ass up off the couch when it went off. Worked out perfectly, for me anyway!
Let the cookies cool about 10 minutes on the baking tray to start to firm up before moving them over to a wire rack to completely cool. As the famous Porky Pig saying goes..."And that's all, folks!" I have to admit that these turned out twice as good as I was hoping for so the recipe is definitely flawed......you definitely should at least double, if not triple it because these are sure to be gone in the blink of an eye! I ended up making a double batch myself and am happy to report that even after 10 days in a sealed container even the very last cookie to get gobbled up was still mega soft and just as good as day 1!
How did 24 cookies last 10 days? Well, I had to compare these to store-bought premade dough of the exact same mix so I ended up with 48 cookies, lol. The proof is in the pics, but check them out below for yourself. Store-bought premade dough ended up kind of flat and less appealing, but still tasty of course. You definitely can tell they contain a lot more preservatives and filler junk, though.
I have to say that for the minimal effort to make these cookies from scratch, the homemade version is far superior and void of who knows what kind of preservatives and junk! To sweeten the pot even more, you can make up a huge batch and freeze them as little cookie balls till you are ready to bake them. You will have to bake frozen cookie balls a couple extra minutes, but I would suggest to get out as many as you want and thaw them prior to baking in the fridge the night before to not screw things up. You may want to google it since I'm no professional capable of giving actual good baking advice, lol! No matter which route you choose, definitely give these White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies a try. They are truly life changing, trust me. As always, stay classy and make amazing food....just keep cooking!
WHITE CHOCOLATE MACADAMIA NUT COOKIES
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