Chewy White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies With Toffee Bits

Here's a quick and easy recipe for white chocolate macadamia nut cookies with toffee bits. These cookies are crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside and loaded with deliciousness! The great thing about this batch is that there's plenty of left over dough for you to freeze for an even quicker fresh cookie fix another day. The hardest thing about making these cookies is having the patience to chill the dough. Unless you want your cookies to spread into a flat mess, chilling is crucial. Let's get started. 

Step 1: Ingredients

We'll split the ingredients into four groups, 

The Starters: 
2 sticks of unsalted butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar


The Wet:
2 large eggs
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract 


The Dry:
2 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt 

The Goodies:
1 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup toffee bits 
1 1/4 cup roasted, salted  macadamia nuts

First things first. Grab the butter and the eggs and pull them out of the fridge. You want to give them a good 25 minutes to warm up. You want the butter softened but not fully up to room temp. Also, preheat your oven to 375. If you want a more consistently baked cookie, preheat to 350 but 375 gives you a nice crispness on the outside and leaves the center chewy. 

Step 2: Creaming

Hopefully you've got a stand mixer or an electric mixer. If you don't, no biggie, the only thing that really changes is you will want your butter to be room temp. 

Chop the sticks of butter up into squares around 1/4" - 1/2" thick and put the butter and both sugars in the bowl of your mixer. Start off on low for about a minute. As the butter starts to break down and the sugar starts incorporating put the mixer on medium. You want the butter and sugar fully incorporated and light and fluffy. Pay attention though as you don't want to let it mix too long. 

Step 3: The Wet Stuff

Go ahead and crack your eggs and yolk into a liquid measuring cup or something else that will be easy to pour from. Measure out your vanilla and put that in with the eggs as well. With your mixer on medium add the eggs one at a time. Allow them enough time to fully incorporate before adding the next. The whole process should only take a minute or two. When you're done, turn off the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl. 

Step 4: The Dry Stuff

When measuring out your flour, instead of taking the 1c. measuring cup and scooping out of the bag, use the 1/2c. to scoop from the bag then dump into the 1c.  When the 1c. is overflowing level it off with a straight edge, dump that into a new, empty bowl and continue to measure out like that. When you're done measuring the flour, add the salt and baking powder to the bowl. Whisk this a couple of times by hand. 

Add the dry ingredients to the dough in thirds. With the mixer off, put in about a third of the dry ingredients. Put the mixer on low-med and mix until the flour is incorporated, as soon as it is turn off the mixer and add the next third. Be sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl every time you add more flour. Also it's important not to over mix here so as soon as it's all together, turn your mixer off. 

Step 5: The Goodies

Now the good stuff. I prefer roasted, salted macs because I like the extra crunch and roasty flavor. I also prefer white chocolate chunks and cutting my own toffee chunks but I couldn't find any in enough time to do this instructable. All the large bits of toffee I found also had milk chocolate covering them and that would just muck up this cookie. So I opted for the toffee bits. 

Add the chips, bits, and nuts to the batter and pulse your mixer just until mixed. If the dough isn't extra soft and sticky right here, you can go right into the shaping step. I'll sometimes throw the whole mixing bowl in the freezer for 10 minutes or so and I'll end up with much cleaner hands when handling cold dough. 

Shaping: line a cookie sheet or cooling rack in tin foil or parchment paper and make golf ball sized balls but flatten them just a bit as to not have perfect circles. Fit as many on a sheet as you can and toss this in the freezer for 25 minutes. After that, you're ready to go. 

Step 6: Baking

Arrange your cookies on a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a silpat.  Be sure to give them enough room to spread. Toss them in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes. The edges will be golden brown and the centers will still be soft. Give them a minute or two to cool off before trying to transfer them to a cooling rack as they will be a bit gooey at first. 

Step 7: Done and Done!

These cookies set nicely when they cool. They seem a bit soft when first out but the texture they develop after cooling is crisp and chewy. I hope you enjoy these. Remember to take any dough you don't bake off and toss it in a freezer bag, put that in the freezer and you're ready to roll!