White Choc Macadamia Nut Cookies
& on drop cookie recipes
new on bbs
Macadamia & White Chocolate Chip Cookies
Chunky, packed cookies made with an easy butterscotch flavored cookie dough. Brown butter based, these cookies have crispy edges and are thick, packed with a ton of chocolate and nuts.
pies for papa
Brownie Pie
Deeply chocolaty fudgy brownie baked into a flaky all-butter pie crust and topped with an ultra creamy whipped cream. (psps: this is great with my brown butter pie crust!)
S’mores Pie
Crushed up sugar cones, brown butter fudge sauce, smooth chocolate ice cream and a torched, billowing vanilla meringue.
Lime Chiffon Pie
Tangy and utterly creamy; a hybrid between a cream pie and a no-bake cheesecake. It uses fresh lime zest and juice to flavor the filling.
From the June Archives
2024: No Bake Chocolate Cheesecake
2023: Chewy Ice Cream Cone Cookies (crushed up sugar cones in the cookie dough, plus sprinkles!)
2022: Brownie Baked Alaska (brownie base, vanilla & lemon curd ice cream, toasted meringue)
2021: Chocolate Caramel Peanut Brownies (like a snickers brownie - but better!)
2020: Milk Bread Chocolate Babka
2019: Jerusalem Bagel Bombs (these are a longtime favorite and I make them often when people come over)
a baker’s review
“This cake turned out amazing! It was very moist and delicious. I used whole fat buttermilk and cake flour and it came out great. I added whipping cream to the buttercream along with the chocolate, and it came out fluffy and chocolatey! My family loved it!” Destiny on Black Cocoa Cake
weekly reads
“According to Fernando Martinez, an organizer for the Mixteco Indigenous Community Organizing Project, as the strawberry picking starts, “Our people are having to risk going to work, to pay their rent and for their basic needs,” he said. “But they go with the fear of not coming back home to their kids.” That fear can make workers more reluctant to demand higher wages and better conditions. “It especially affects them when employers threaten to call immigration if they start organizing. It’s a big fear,” he said. “No one wants to get sent back to the country they left for a better future. A lot of people have kids and they’ve been here for 15 or 20 years. This is what people consider home.”” Farmworker Youth Take to the Streets as Deportations and Displacement Threaten Their Parents, Civil Eats.
“One family with three children were held inside a Los Angeles-area administrative building for 48 hours after being arrested on Thursday immediately after an immigration court hearing, according to lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), which is providing non-profit legal services in the region. The children, the youngest of whom is three years old, were provided a bag of chips, a box of animal crackers and a mini carton of milk as their sole rations for a day. Agents told the family they did not have any water to provide during the family’s first day in detention; on the second day, all five were given a single bottle to share. The one fan in the room was pointed directly towards a guard, rather than towards the families in confinement, they told lawyers.” Families arrested in LA Ice raids held in basements with little food or water, The Guardian.
“"They're serving rotten food. People are getting sick. My spouse is not eating," J. told NPR in May. His loved one was being held at Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Fla. He asked that we refer to him by his first initial because he fears retaliation against his loved one.
J. is one of the many family members of detainees who called NPR to report their loved ones not receiving meals or getting rotten food. Detainees who NPR spoke to over the phone confirmed this, and many said they'd had to sleep on the floor for weeks. The situation at Krome Detention Center is believed to have gotten so dire, Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida paid a surprise visit there last week. She told NPR that in the intake area, two to three dozen men are "crammed into the perimeter of a very tiny room for up to 48 hours. They defecate in front of each other, they eat, they sleep on stone floors. It's really inhumane."” In recorded calls, reports of overcrowding and lack of food at ICE detention centers, NPR.
a baker’s note
on that new recipe; I have been testing those macadamia nut cookies for over two years now, lol. Not because the recipe is particularly complicated or exceptionally new, it was more that I couldn’t decide what I wanted from and for the cookie, though I knew I wanted something different than what I had seen and what I had already given you.
The thing about brown sugar/butter drop cookies with add-ins: they’re all so similar and you can usually take your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe and swap in whatever nut, or chocolate, or dried fruit and call it something new. I could have said, here’s a new cookie recipe and just used this egg yolk chocolate chip cookie or brown butter egg yolk chocolate chip cookie or even these bakery style chocolate chip cookies, and swap in the dark chocolate for white and macadamia nuts. But I just always want to offer you something new and different. I have this goal of having a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe for every person in the world, no matter their taste (except the people out there who want a Tate’s copycat - sorry). So, when I approach a new drop cookie/chocolate chunk combination, I see it as an opportunity to create a dough base that might appeal to someone who hasn’t yet found their favorite.
For this one, I started back in ‘23 with this recipe as a base, but browned the butter and used caramelized white chocolate instead of white (obviously). I was getting a pretty dry cookie, got annoyed and left it for awhile.
Earlier this year, I tried again but skipped browning the butter and instead did my butterscotchy trick I’ve been doing on blondies since 2019 (if you made my more recent sourdough chocolate chip cookies, you’ll recognize it).
If you wanted something thinner/flatter and more buttery, more like the subway cookie that inspired this one, here’s what you do: don’t brown the butter. Instead, partially melt it then add the sugar and follow the heating method with the sugar and butter. You’ll want to drop the pan on the counter right after it bakes to further flatten them. Then you’ll get a cookie that looks like this:
Above is the cookie I very nearly published, but after having it ready and waiting for a few months, I went back again and decided to go with my original idea to brown the butter to amplify the ‘nutty’ notes. I kept the butterscotching method and tweaked the quantities so I would get a dense, not at all dry, cookie. It didn’t feel greasy like the version before it, was different than anything I’d posted yet, and was my favorite version of the cookies, so it won a space on the blog.
I hope that if you looked at this recipe and thought: I don’t like white chocolate OR macadamia nuts, you’ll check it out anyway. I want you to see beyond the add'-ins and find a new brown sugar drop cookie base to make something that appeals to you personally, adding whatever you want to make it yours. I can’t always promise it will turn out the same (chocolate chips and chunks and different kinds of chocolate do different things to the dough as it bakes) but if you haven’t found your favorite base yet, maybe it’ll bring you closer to the cookie your heart is still chasing after!
sam