White chocolate and macadamia nuts are a great combination. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Creamy, smooth white chocolate, with its mild vanilla flavor, is a great match for the buttery, crunchy and slightly sweet macadamia nuts, as neither element overwhelms the other.

One thing that I’ve found that can make the combination even better is to add a little bit of salt to the mix. These white chocolate macadamia nut cookies are sprinkled with salt before baking, cutting a little bit of the sweetness of the cookies and making them even more addictive. It’s the same concept that is used for these Salty Oat Cookies and Salted Caramels. You can use regular table salt for these or a coarse sea or kosher salt. If you use table salt, use a pinch to sprinkle over the cookies. If you use salt with large crystals, you’ll want to use less salt overall because the bigger crystals have a more lasting salty flavor and you don’t want to entirely overwhelm the cookies. A smaller pinch, and perhaps a more careful distribution of the salt crystals, is best.

In addition to the salt on top, I also used salted macadamia nuts in the cookies and added a little bit of salt to the dough. As always, I started with unsalted butter for these. If your macadamia nuts are unsalted, that is fine, although I do recommend lightly toasting them for a better flavor.

These cookies bake up to be slightly chewy in the center and crisp on the edges. They spread out a bit during baking, so be sure to leave a little bit of room between the balls of dough on the baking sheet. If you prefer your cookies to be crispier, bake them for a few additional minutes, until they have turned light brown all over. (more…)

French macarons are thin, chewy, meringue cookies that are sandwiched together with some kind of filling. The cookies should be light and chewy, with a very thin, crisp “crust” that gives way as soon as you bite down into it. The meringue has a lot of ground nuts - usually almonds - incorporated into it, which contributes a nice nutty taste and adds to the chewy finished texture by giving the cookies some substance. They’re very elegant to look at and are available at many, many bakeries in France. Here in the US, they’re a lot less common, but they’re relatively easy to make at home, although they are slightly more involved than baking up a regular batch of chocolate chip cookies.

These are Nutella Macarons, made with ground hazelnuts and cocoa powder in the meringue cookie and smeared with a little bit of Nutella to sandwich them together. The cookies themselves have good chocolate flavor and a nice nuttiness to them. The recipe seems to call for a lot of sugar, but the cookies aren’t actually all that sweet on their own. Nutella is a great filling for these because it highlights the chocolate and hazelnut, and requires no prep work (it goes straight from the jar into the cookie). The cookies only need a thin layer of Nutella to hold them together; you could pile it on like an Oreo filling if you really want too, but the cookies taste and store better if you keep it pretty thin.

The cookies are made by folding a meringue into a dough of ground nuts, cocoa powder and egg whites, creating a lightweight batter with a lot of flavor. The cookie batter must be piped onto baking sheets to ensure that you get cookies of uniform size and shape. Piping is also much faster and much cleaner than trying to hand-drop this batter. Once the cookies are piped out, they must sit at room temperature for a few minutes to form a slight “skin” that gives them their classically smooth look. The cookies are then baked, cooled and filled. The cookies are best within 2-3 days of baking and keep well when stored in an airtight container.

You can either buy whole hazelnuts and grind them yourself in the food processor, or look for hazelnut meal in a specialty store (Whole Foods, for instance, sometimes carries it). It is not necessary to skin the nuts before processing them if you start with whole hazelnuts, as you will not be able to see the brown flecks from the hazelnut skin in the chocolate cookies. If you can’t find hazelnuts, you can easily use ground almonds in this recipe, but the finished cookie will have a slight almond flavor to it in addition to the flavors of chocolate and Nutella.

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Drop cookies, made of dough that is casually shaped into a ball and dropped onto a cookie sheet, are not always the most attention-getting cookies. I think that they’re probably the most often made type of cookie, since they are very quick and easy when compared to cut-out cookies, but they don’t hold a candle to the cutouts when it comes to presentation. That being said, drop cookies are usually packed with lots of great flavors and I think that we’ve all learned to appreciate them, sometimes in spite of a plain outward appearance.

These Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal Cookies definitely fall into the plain-but-surprisingly-flavorful category. The have peanut butter, oats, and mashed banana in them. I actually was inspired to make them by the banana peanut butter I tried recently, so I put these together by mixing some into my Banana Oatmeal Cookies. The fact that I know the flavor combination is a good one in general didn’t hurt things, either.

The finished cookies looked like your basic oatmeal cookies, but tasted like a cross between a peanut butter cookie and banana bread. The banana flavor was good, but not overwhelming, and the peanut butter added a nice nuttiness to the whole thing. The cookies stayed moist, slightly chewy and fresh tasting for several days when stored in an airtight container, so these are a great option if you want to bake a batch over the weekend and keep it around during the week. I used smooth peanut butter for these cookies, but using crunchy would add a little bit more texture if that’s your peanut butter preference at home.
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Compared to fresh fruits and dried fruits, freeze dried fruits are not really all that flavorful. But they do have some advantages over their juicier counterparts. For instance, they can be stored pretty much indefinitely without spoiling. They can also be worked into recipes where other types of fruit just won’t work out. This property turns out to be a great advantage when you like to play with flavors. You certainly could chop up a strawberry and put it into some chocolate chip cookie dough, you’ll end up with a cookie that might be a little too soft and strawberries that might be a little too watery/mushy after baking. Freeze dried strawberries, by contrast, can be stirred into just about any dough, adding color and flavor without altering the consistency of the original recipe.

I used this method - and a bag a freeze dried strawberries - to make these Strawberry Chocolate Chip Cookies. Their flavor was more muted than that of a regular strawberry, but it was still distinct and made a nice change from the standard chocolate chip cookie. I was also able to use a lot of berries because the dried berries mixed into the cookie dough very easily, rather like adding a handful of oats. I used my hand mixer to stir them in. Don’t be worried if the mixer breaks up the berries! This just distributes the flavor more evenly throughout the dough.

I loved the fact that you could taste the strawberries while the cookies retained their chewy, chocolate chip cookie consistency. The baking time given below should give you a soft/chewy cookie after they cool down to room temperature, but you could bake them for another minute or two if you prefer a crisper cookie. The chocolate does have a stronger flavor than the berries, so don’t go overboard with the quantity of chocolate chips in this cookie or you’ll end up with only a hint of strawberry flavor in the end result.

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Brown sugar and butter are the two main components of butterscotch, but for some reason, it is very tricky to really nail down the flavor - if it were easy, most chocolate chip cookies would have a strong butterscotch flavor, not just a hint of brown sugar. These cookies, on the other hand, do have a butterscotch flavor. They have a lot of brown sugar in the recipe and a fair amount of butter. All that sugar melts in the oven, combining with the butter, and making a cookie that packs a lot of flavor even though it looks very plain. There is also quite a bit of vanilla extract in the dough, which gives the overall flavor a smoothness and a nice, rich note.

The cookie dough is very easy to make. It isn’t as thick as most doughs, and for this reason I prefer to wrap it up in wax paper and chill it before baking. Slicing cookies off of a frozen log of dough is a great way to ensure that all the cookies are about the same size. It also helps to control their spread slightly, and these cookies spread out a lot to be quite thin. They’re still moist and chewy in the middle and crisp on the edges, though! If you want the cookies to be very chewy all over, reduce the baking time by about a minute. If you want them to be more crisp, bake them until the edges are slightly browned.

My favorite thing about this particular cookie recipe is that there is quite a bit of salt in it. This gives the finished cookies the same slightly salty note that salted caramels have and keeps the cookies from being too sweet. It also makes your mouth water for more after eating one. I would only use unsalted butter (I normally use unsalted butter anyway) in this recipe so that you have good control over the amount of salt in the finished cookie. If you must use salted butter, cut back on the amount of added salt a bit.

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One of the best things about Easter is that there is lots of specialty candy available and most of it is on sale. I don’t mind having egg-shaped versions of some of my favorite candies for a couple of weeks after the holiday - or before the holiday, for that matter. I picked up a bag of Reese’s Pieces Eggs, which I like for their peanut buttery filling and colorful, shiny shells, and used them to top of these simple shortbread cookies.

The cookies are easy to make and the brightly colored eggs give them a really festive look for, say, an Easter brunch. The shortbread recipe is one I wrote down in my recipe book some time ago, and it originally came from a package of Land o’ Lakes butter. Once the dough is made, it should be chilled for a little while because it will be easier to handle and shape the balls of dough. Each dough ball is pressed down with a finger (creating a fingerprint that ends up looking a little bit like a nest for the eggs) and slightly chilled dough will also hold the shape of the fingerprint much better than unchilled dough once it gets into the oven.

When it comes to candies, the brighter the colors are, the better; they really stand out on the pale shortbread base. I would strongly recommend sticking to hard-shelled candies - whether they are chocolate-filled, peanut butter-filled, nut-filled or anything else - even though the candies are added on after the cookies come out of the oven. The reason for this is that the candies still have to be placed on top of very hot cookie dough for them to stick, and an unprotected candy will simply not hold up as well. It will still taste yummy, of course, but it may look a little bit messy!

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