Christmas Cookies

White Chocolate. Macadamia. Dried Cranberries. Three easy additions to a delicious cookie dough. Read our first post to hear about "the butter incident" and how the cookies turned out.

For about three years now, I have been baking the best cranberry white chocolate macadamia cookies for Christmas. Every year around November, my close friends start to ask when they're going to receive their batch. They're extremely easy to make or so we thought.

"As Maddie and I gathered the ingredients, I noticed Maddie had shopped for them at whole foods.They were all organic and fancy looking. The butter sticks were short and chubby. They were adorable."

Ingredients:

1 cup of flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/8 cup white sugar

1/8 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

6 tbsp butter (room temp)

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

3/4 cup white chocolate chips

3/4 cup macadamia nuts

1/3 cup dried cranberries

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Here's the fun thing about this simple recipe, you can mix by hand or with an actual mixer. We did a little bit of both.

Mix flour, salt, baking soda together in small bowl.

In medium bowl mix together butter and brown and white sugar. Then add in egg and vanilla.

Pour the flour mixture into the medium bowl and combine for 3 minutes until it becomes a dough and the ingredients are evenly combined.

Then add in the white chocolate chips, macadamia nuts, and dried cranberries.

Let dough chill for thirty minutes.

Scoop 1 tablespoon size and roll into balls then gently press to flatten the top, just a lil bit.

(Optional but Cute: Add extra toppings for decoration.)

Bake at 325 for 13 minutes. Produces 24 regular sized cookies (2.5 inch diameter)

So, here's the story. My parents are Dominican and at some point I told Maddie that Dominican vanilla tastes best in this particular recipe because it gives it a mysterious holiday flavor. It tastes exactly like what Christmas would taste like if it were a flavor. Some things just need to be experienced so we decided that we'd make two batches: one with regular pure vanilla extract and one with Dominican vanilla. For our blog inauguration and help deciding which vanilla fit the recipe best we invited a group of our closest friends from high school.

As Maddie and I gathered all the ingredients, I noticed Maddie had shopped for them at Whole Foods. They were all organic and fancy looking. The butter sticks were short and chubby. They were adorable. Because they were short I thought they were similar to the half sticks sold at Publix and I didn't think to verify the measurements. I used one and a half sticks for the recipe which should have amounted to 6 tbsps. We mixed all the ingredients and refrigerated the dough for thirty minutes so that the cookies would keep a nice shape while baking. We scooped out balls of dough using 1 tbsp of dough each time. This amount makes average sized cookies (diameter of 2.5").

We had one tray for our Dominican batch and one tray for our regular batch. We baked them for 13 minutes at 325 degrees. When our timer went off, we rushed to the oven in excitement to find the saddest and softest blobs of dough swimming in mini pools of butter. It was so disappointing. This is what we now call, "the butter incident."

It was also really funny since we had invited everyone to see how great we were and to help us rank the batches on scale from great to greater.

Thankfully, we had only baked our Dominican batch so we were able to salvage our regular batch with a little bit of math skills (yay ratios). We looked at the butter and read the measurements on the packaging. The sticks were short, but because they were fat they actually had the same exact amount as a regular stick of butter. I had been tricked! Anyways, I though I put in 6 tbsp but since the stick was a full stick (8 tbsp) and I had used 1.5 sticks, we ended up with 12 tbsp. With twice the amount of butter in our recipe, the rest of the ingredients needed to be doubled as well. After catching and correcting our mistake we let the dough chill once more. They came out amazing. We didn't get to compare the two vanillas, but stay tuned for an update on the Dominican vanilla verdict.