Last week, I told you all that I misjudged the Bake From Scratch cookbooks. The one I originally reviewed didn’t have much appeal to me. However, I will now admit that I was wrong. Baking a recipe out of the fifth volume proves it!

I recently acquired (read: purchased) the fifth volume and eagerly paged through some recipes in hopes of finding one that would re-ignite the baker in my soul. Eventually, I settled on a cookie that can only be described as a homemade version of Pepperidge Farm’s Tahoe cookie. While I had many of the staple ingredients already on-hand. I knew purchasing macadamia nuts would be an expense (I was proven correct). Despite this, I was determined to bake these fabulous-looking cookies, because I knew that this recipe would redeem my opinion of the Bake From Scratch line.

I headed to the grocery store to buy the nuts white chocolate, vanilla bean paste (yes, paste!), and a few items I just needed to have in the house. I returned home and toasted the macadamia nuts. The recipe called for salted and roasted nuts, but I couldn’t find those in my local grocery store. I opted to roast the nuts myself and I increased the salt in the recipe by a smidge to compensate.

Making It

I then allowed the nuts to cool before beginning the next steps of this recipes. I will admit, this recipe is a bit time consuming, but nothing is overly complicated. In my opinion, I think the hardest step would be making the brown butter. But that is just something that takes practice and a little babysitting. And the results are totally worth it!

Brown Butter

Brown butter is pretty simple to make. And it doesn’t require room temperature butter, though allowing your butter to sit out for a bit will only speed up the process. I’ve also found better success if I cut the butter up into large chunks. Since I needed to use two sticks of butter, I had a total of three chunks. This helped the butter to melt quicker.

Place the butter over a medium to medium high burner on your stove and let it melt. Continue cooking the butter until the fat solids separate from the liquid and fall the bottom of the pan. Eventually they will turn a golden brown color. The liquid will also change color, from a bright, sunny yellow, to a golden brown color. Once it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat! It’s done. You do not want to burn the solids on the bottom of the pan. That’s the flavor. If they burn you’ll have to start all over and that would be sad.

I then allowed the browned butter to cool for about 10-15 minutes before continuing on with the recipe. I did enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to wait for the butter to re-solidify and then come back to room temperature before continuing on. I enjoy baking but sometimes the waiting becomes too much, even though I know that the results are worth it in the end.

Once the butter was cool enough to not immediately melt the sugars, I started making the batter. This batter is a pretty standard cookie batter. However, it does use one ingredient that I hadn’t used before, but it was definitely worth the purchase of nearly $13 for the small tube. Adding the vanilla bean paste provided more flavor than standard vanilla extract and the teeny flecks of vanilla bean throughout the batter were a nice touch.

The time eventually came to add the white chocolate and macadamia nuts. Instead of going for the cheaper and easier route, I decided to purchase the higher-quality white chocolate bars that can be found in the candy aisle. I used Lindt brand for this recipe. I wanted texture in the cookie so I didn’t chop the chocolate too small; instead cutting each square into rough thirds.

After roasting and cooling the nuts, I chopped those up as well. This was a bit more time consuming than I thought it would be. The nuts were soft and broke easily, even after roasting. So the chopping process was long and slow-going. For the nuts I also made sure to have different sizes to provide different textures with each cookie.

Baking It

The recipe yields about 24 cookies, though I ended up with 26. This recipe was interesting in that it also gave a gram weight measurement for how much dough to use for each cookie. Roughly 45 grams. Granted some of my cookies had as much as 5 grams over, but some were also around three or four grams under as well (Those pesky nuts and chocolate pieces!). Despite this small change in gram size, many of the cookies baked up to the same shape and baked evenly.

Baking these was a slow process since only six cookies could fit on a half sheet pan. They ended up being a slightly larger cookie than I was expecting it to be. These cookies also needed a 10-minute rest on the baking sheet before transferring to the cooling rack. So, I had a total of two pans alternating.

In total the baking time of the four pans took about 45 minutes. Some cookie sheets had to go for 12 minutes, while others got away with 10. I’m not sure what could had led to this discrepancy. While it’s true a few cookie balls were slightly larger than most, I think it basically had to do with the fact that one pan I was using was silver and the other was gold colored.

After I transferred the slightly cooled cookies to a cooling rack, I added the finishing touch. A sprinkle of sea salt. I didn’t just do this because I wasn’t able to toss to the macadamia nuts in salt after roasting. I did it because the recipe called for it and I knew that by doing so, I would have a wonderfully tied-together cookie flavor.

You can see some of the cookies cooling on the picture below.

Tasting It

These cookies were made for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to test out my new Bake From Scratch cookbook. But secondly we were having a few people over for dinner and I wanted something nice and different for dessert. While cookies aren’t exactly different or special, THESE cookies certainly are!

If you ever had a Tahoe cookie from Pepperidge Farm then you almost know what you are getting yourself into when you are presented with a plate of these cookies in front of you. However, I would argue that these cookies are even better than the Pepperidge Farm ones. The flavor is much more developed, the nuts are larger, providing a nice crunch, and the white chocolate is smoother and higher quality. Remember I didn’t use white chocolate chips in these. I purchased a bars of white chocolate and chopped them up.

As predicted, the sea salt on top tied all the flavors together. They were a major hit and the remaining half dozen didn’t last very long! I’ve already been asked to make them again. And, honestly, I would in a heart beat. Except macadamia nuts are very expensive. However, despite what some people believe, macadamia nuts are a sustainable food source and do not provide much negative impact on the environment.

Until next time, readers…