Chunky Macadamia & White Chocolate Cookies
Cook Time 1 hour
Servings 8
Ingredients
330g raw macadamia nuts
195g unsalted butter, cold and diced
115g light muscovado (or brown) sugar
150g demerara (or raw) sugar
100g egg (approx. 2 eggs), cold
15g vanilla paste
275g plain flour
50g cornflour (wheatened)
7g baking powder
6g bicarbonate of soda
6g fine sea salt
270g very good and small white chocolate chips
Sea salt flakes, for sprinkling
Method
Heat the oven to 140ºC. Coarsely chop the macadamias so they are mainly halved chonky pieces. Place on a baking try and toast in the oven for around 30 minutes until evenly pale gold. Cool the nuts quickly in the fridge
Take care toasting macadamias with their high oil content. The final cookies will be straw gold on the outside. Having the nuts match this internal dough colour makes the cookie eating experience ridiculously good!
Large nut pieces bring textural excitement and the small shards and ‘nut dust’ add flavour and take up some of the moisture in the dough.
Place the butter, sugars and vanilla in the bowl of an electric stand mixer. Using the paddle attachment, beat on speed 2 (low) for about 5 minutes until the mix looks like sugary mash – no need to go to pale and fluffy. Scrape the sides down once during this beating.
I keep this base mix cold and mashed rather than warmer and fluffier so my cookie dough texture is closed and dense rather than porous.
Sift the flour, cornflour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a small bowl and set aside. Weigh the white chocolate chips with the cooled chopped nuts and set them aside.
Keeping on speed 2 (low), add the egg in one go and beat for 5 minutes, scraping once or twice during this stage. The butter/sugar/egg mix will be taupe brown and have a porridgey consistency. This is good.
Reduce to speed 1 (lowest) and add the dry ingredients and mix just until no flour is visible. Tip the chocolate and nuts in and mix until only just incorporated. Take the bowl off the mixer, scrape the dough off the paddle and scrape the dough onto your work surface. Give the dough a thorough but brief mix and fold so any buttery seams from the bottom can be mixed in well.
Line a tray with baking paper. Weigh balls of dough to 170 g each (this is NOT A TYPO! It is a huge cookie).
Roll each ball gently but don’t compact the dough – it should be a sticky, spiky sphere. Place closely together on the tray. I like to cover and chill. for a minimum of 12 hours but you can bake away straight away.
An overnight hydrate does make a better tasting and textured (a little less spread) cookie but you can bake these straight away
When you are ready to bake the cookies, heat the oven to 170ºC. Lightly spray a baking tray with cooking oil spray and line with baking paper (or reuse the one under the chilling balls).
Arrange the dough balls on the tray, spacing them 5-7 cm apart. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the cookies have puffed to a dome, are a golden straw brown colour and feel firmed up at the sides. Because these are big’uns, I do like to do a temperature check and a digital probe, inserted, should read 70ºC for doughy interior perfection.
Optimally, rest the baked cookie for 15-20 minutes before eating for pure gooey cookie dough joy. When the cookie cools and firms it is good just not GOOD good.
