Heart Eyes, Vol. 232: Two Exceptional Cookies
Friends! Hello. Happy Friday. Happy Solstice, happy winter, merry Christmas, happy New Year!
This pre-holiday week has been an intense one here at Heart Eyes HQ—I missed last week’s newsletter because I was at the emergency vet—but things are looking up. Sherlock is home from his stay at the kitty hospital; I’m lucky enough to be off work through the New Year; I’m looking forward to a few festive, easy plans before I’m off to my parents’ for Christmas. And after that? The glorious nothing of the last week of the year. What a treat.
Whatever you’re doing in these last days of 2023, I hope it gives you life and light. Especially now, I think you’re doing great.
What to Bake: COOKIES!!!
This year I did something for the holidays that I’ve never done before: I made (am still making!) cookie boxes to pass out to friends and colleagues. This is obviously right up my alley, given my twin passions for baking and giving away baked goods, but somehow it wasn’t even a tradition I was really aware of until the pandemic. But how much fun did I have ordering cute little tartan boxes and poring over recipes and buying so, so, so much butter? I think you can imagine how much fun.
I included five types of sweets in my cookie boxes: my beloved pretzel toffee, a couple of Sohla El-Waylly’s fruity meltaways (I used raspberry), a big ginger-molasses cookie, and two more that I think would make especially good candidates for any last-minute holiday baking you might have on deck:
Chocolate Chip Cookies with Salted Walnut Brittle
Of the many good things I baked this year, a handful became repeats, and then staples in my repertoire. The Chocolate Chip Cookies with Salted Walnut Brittle from Smitten Kitchen Keepers is one of these recipes, and if I may say so, it’s a doozy.
Truthfully, I’ve been holding out on you a bit with these cookies, knowing you all would love them but assuming that Deb might not love me sharing recipes from a still-new cookbook in my free newsletter. But then here they are, published with permission right there in People magazine! It’s a holiday miracle!
As you may have guessed, these are chocolate-chip cookies with chunks of walnut brittle mixed in; I made them a lot of times and toted them to a lot of places this year and they were a hit every time. The base cookies are thick and chewy and velvety with brown sugar and would be excellent on their own, but ooh, that crunchy, salty walnut brittle. It really levels up the texture and rounds out the toffee flavor. I think it’s a spectacular cookie.
If you’re looking at this and thinking, “what kind of lunatic wants to make candy before they make cookies?”, I also want to impress upon you that I had the same concern—and that I genuinely think these cookies are not annoying to make. The brittle adds a truly minimal amount of time and effort to the recipe; if you have five hands-off minutes and a handful of walnuts to spare, you can do this, and I feel certain you won’t be sorry.
Confetti Cookies
As I’ve begun handing out my boxes, I’ve gotten plenty of kind feedback about everything inside—but one cookie gotten far and away the most love from the most people. Would it surprise you to hear that it’s a sugar cookie?
The sprinkle-encrusted Smitten Kitchen Confetti Cookies are a site favorite, but I had always given them just the tiniest bit of side-eye. They’re so pretty—Deb makes me want to invest in fancy sprinkles, though in this case I used a huge jar of Christmas sprinkles I found on sale at Target—but in what universe is a sprinkle cookie competitive with, say, walnut brittle and chocolate chips?
Well, it turns out, this one. Everyone loves these cookies. As a friend pointed out—literally in a spontaneous and lively group chat about how good they are—it’s mostly about the cream cheese: there’s just a bit of it in the batter, and it lends so much tenderness and complexity to the final cookie. And with all that vanilla? It’s magic. I happened to have one precious vanilla bean on hand and I used half of it here, but I’ll probably use extract in the future and I trust that they’ll be just as perfect. You might like them, too.
Happy holidays, everyone! I’ll see you in the new year.