White Chocolate-Macadamia Nut-Oatmeal Cookies with Dried Cherries

At some point last year, I was talking with my mom on the phone on a day when I was trying to decide what kind of cookies to bake. Her first suggestion was White Chocolate and Macadamia Nut Cookies. I ended up not making them at the time, but I did stop to wonder: why haven’t I ever made those? Fast forward to a year later, and I knew exactly what kind of cookies to bake for my mom after she fell and broke her ankle. It’s a proven fact that cookies help with all recoveries, I think. I had a recipe from the December 2012 issue of Saveur for exactly this type of cookie. But, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I wanted chunky cookies with oats in them and maybe some dried fruit as well. In Alice Medrich’s Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies, there is a version with oats. However, in that recipe, the oats are chopped to bits in a food processor. I followed the recipe for quantities but stirred everything together by hand and kept the oats whole for maximum chunkiness. And, then I added dried sour cherries. The result was a dangerous thing. I like baking cookies to share, but I kind of wanted to keep all of these for myself. 

I started by roasting two cups of macadamia nuts. I sprinkled on sea salt, and it sticks to the nuts as the oils are released while roasting. They roasted at 350 degrees F for about eight minutes and then were coarsely chopped. This cookie dough is easy to stir together because melted butter is used. Two sticks, or 16 tablespoons, of butter was melted and set aside. One and a half cups of flour were sifted with a teaspoon of baking soda and a half teaspoon of salt. One and a half cups of oats were added to the flour mixture. In a separate bowl, the melted butter was combined with two-thirds cup of granulated sugar, two-thirds cup of brown sugar, and two teaspoons of vanilla extract. The flour mixture was added to the egg mixture and was stirred to combine. The chopped nuts, two cups of white chocolate chips, and two cups of dried sour cherries were added to the dough. Then, the dough was refrigerated for a couple of hours. Because of the melted butter in the dough, it needs some chilling time before baking. Heaping tablespoons of dough were baked on sheets at 325 degrees F for about 15 minutes, and sheet pans were rotated halfway through baking. 

These were indeed chunky cookies just as I’d hoped, and they were packed with great flavors. The salted, buttery macadamia nuts contrasted with the sweetness of the white chocolate, and the chewy pieces of dried sour cherries were a nice fruity addition. I can’t prove they’ll help Mom’s ankle heal faster, but cookies are always good medicine. 

I am a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program.

Old-Fashioned Christmas Butter Cookies

When the holiday baking season was fast approaching, I grabbed a copy of the new Gourmet Cookie Book. A couple of years ago, there was a cookie article in the magazine that offered the best cookie, as chosen by the editors, from each decade going back to the 1940s, and this book is an extension of that idea. It includes the best cookie from each and every year the magazine was published from 1941 to 2009. What I find particularly interesting about this book is that the recipes were reprinted as they were originally written, and there are notes throughout regarding how recipe writing styles have changed over the years. In some of the earliest recipes, the instructions were a little vague with suggestions to place cookies in a "moderate" oven and "add butter" with no reference to what temperature either should be. If you've baked similar cookies before, certainly you can figure out the process, but it's interesting that these days recipes leave no detail to the imagination. Just in case, the book's editors have provided updated notes on those early recipes to clear up any possible confusion. I started with one of those older recipes, from 1947 to be exact. It's an old-fashioned butter cookie, and I was intrigued by this recipe's use of hard-boiled egg yolks in addition to raw yolks in the dough. I'd seen that done before on a cooking show several years ago, and I wanted to find out how that affected the texture of the cookie.

So, three eggs were hard cooked, the whites weren't used here, but the yolks were pushed through a sieve and set aside. Butter and sugar were creamed, and the instructions suggest doing that by stirring. I only took the old-fashioned concept so far. I used my stand mixer. To the fluffily creamed butter and sugar, the sieved egg yolks were added alternately with sifted flour and three raw egg yolks. Last, some lemon zest was mixed into the dough. The dough was chilled before being rolled and cut into festive shapes. It was an easy dough to roll and cut, and it held its shape well. Before going into that moderate oven, which the editors noted should be 350 degrees F, the cookies were brushed with egg white and sprinkled with chopped nuts and sugar. I used roasted, salted, chopped macadamia nuts for mine.

These were crunchy, crumbly, buttery cookies. They had a nice snap, and I heard that snap repeatedly as these were possibly the easiest-breaking cookies I've baked. Once I realized I needed to handle them more carefully, I started to like that snap with each bite. The sandy, crumbly cookie and the crunchy nutty topping made these a great treat for the holidays or any time of year.

Hawaiian Snowballs

Snowballs, meltaways, and wedding cookies are very similar in style and deliciousness. My grandma used to make a pecan snowball kind of cookie which I loved, but then I discovered the Hawaiian snowball and that changed everything. Last weekend was our Austin food bloggers’ cookie swap, and there were more varieties of cookies than should be legal in one house. We each brought six dozen cookies and then chose from the whole collection which ones we wanted to take home. Deciding what kind of cookie to take to the event was difficult. I had to try a couple of new recipes and one old favorite and ended up making three kinds of cookies for the swap. I’ll show the other two soon, but these Hawaiian snowballs were my first choice. The idea came from the December 2003 issue of Living magazine, and I’ve made them several times since that issue appeared. For the sugar cookie dough itself, I used my favorite recipe of all time which happens to make the best sugar cookies ever.

That best ever sugar cookie dough, Ethel’s sugar cookies from the 1960 Betty Crocker cookbook, was mixed and then left to chill in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, I let the dough come to room temperature and turned it out onto a floured surface. The dough should be flattened somewhat into an oblong shape. Chopped macadamia nuts and chopped, dried pineapple were layered on top of the dough, and then the dough was folded and kneaded until the nuts and fruit were incorporated. Then, you just pull off pieces of dough, roll them into one inch balls, and place them on lined baking sheets. I baked them for about 13 minutes at 400 degrees F, but they should be checked after 10 minutes and then watched. After they cooled, they were dusted with confectioner’s sugar, and I put the sugar in a sieve and shake it over the cookies so no lumps land on the cookies.

The result is a tender, little cookie with a snowy top. The roasted, salted macadamias are a nice contrast to the chewy, sweet pineapple, and I already explained that this sugar cookie dough is the best there is. It really is. And, what can I say, I like Bing Crosby’s “Mele Kalikimaka,” and these cookies go perfectly with that song.