Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies

When my 13-year old son saw that there was a cookie contest here on Instructables, he asked if I could help him write the instructable if he made the cookies. Of course I said yes, and I also volunteered to taste them (for quality assurance purposes only).

The sour taste of cranberries mix well with the sweetness of the white chocolate. There is brown sugar in the cookies to give a bit of caramel flavour, and vanilla for the extra richness.

This dough used here is based on this recipe from Kinuskikissa with a few modifications.

Disclaimer: the cookies were baked using metric units, I've tried to also convert and write down the recipe in US units, but that is not test baked at all. Use the cups and butter sticks at your own risk.

Ingredients

• 175 g butter (1.5 sticks)
• 1.5 dl sugar (3/4 cup)
• 1.5 dl brown sugar (3/4 cup)
• 3 tsp of vanilla sugar (or 1.5 tsp vanilla extract)
• 1 egg

• 3 tsp of baking powder
• 0.5 tsp salt
• 4 dl all-purpose flour (2 cups)

• 100 g white chocolate (3.5 oz, or make it 4 oz, it's chocolate)
• 150 g dried cranberries (5 oz)

Supplies

• Pan
• Whisk
• Baking sheet
• Spoon

Add the butter to a pan, and melt it on medium heat. The butter should bubble vigorously, and if you like some extra caramel taste in your cookies, you can even let the butter brown a bit.

When the butter is fully melted (and browned), it is time to mix in the sugars. Stir until the sugar is at least partially melted. If the sugar is slow to melt down, you can leave the heat on to make it easier.

When the sugars are melted and mixed fully into the butter you should have a paste that is slightly granular. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in one large egg. You don't want scrambled eggs in your cookie dough, so make sure that the heat is off and that you whisk efficiently. You might even want to let it cool down slightly before adding the egg.

Once the egg is mixed in, the mixture should now be quite smooth.

Mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder.
Add the mix a little at a time to the butter, sugar, and egg in the pan and stir until everything is evenly distributed.

Here comes the important part: let the dough cool down thoroughly. If the dough is too warm, the chocolate will melt when mixing it in, and you don't get chunks of chocolate in your cookies.

Your dough is cool now, right? Don't proceed until it is.

If your white chocolate is not in small chunks already, go ahead and chop it up.

Mix in the chopped chocolate and dried cranberries into the cool dough.

This step is technically optional, but it might be good to check how much the cookies expand so you can place them with proper social distancing, and also verify the bake time.

The cookies above are baked for 9 minutes in 200 degrees C, which is about 400 degrees F.

After letting the cookies cool down a bit and quality assurance tasting was performed, we came to the conclusion that one additional minute in the oven should be suitable. The cookies should be crunchy on the outside, while still soft in the middle.

We have thus calibrated the spacing of the dough balls and the bake time, and it's time to proceed to bake the rest of the cookies.

Place suitably sized balls of the dough on a baking sheet on a suitable distance from each other and bake in 200 degrees celcius (400 F) for 8 - 10 minutes (as researched in the test bake).

In this case, nine cookies at a time was optimal for the size of baking sheet used, and we ended up with 9 + 9 (+ 2 test) cookies from this recipe.

Tip: if you have two baking sheets, alternate between them and always use the cooler one to avoid having the chocolate start melting before the sheet goes into the oven.

Tip number 2: let the cookies cool down a bit before removing them from the baking sheet.