Recipe: caramelised white chocolate and roasted pecan cookies

My pursuit to create my ideal chocolate chip cookie took place a little over two years ago.

I became obsessed with reading different recipes - understanding how different ingredients impact the texture and flavour of a cookie; how the way in which you combine the ingredients, and amount of time that you spend doing so, can yield vastly different results from the same mixture; how chill time and baking temperature can produce a stout, gooey cookie or a thin, crisp one - the list goes on. I was fascinated, and incredibly driven. I took it upon myself to test and compare a variety of different recipes, noting what elements of each cookie I enjoyed or disliked, and researching what lead to the elements that I enjoyed, and how to achieve things that I felt some recipes lacked.

My perfect cookie - heady with brown butter, laced with the flavour of brown sugar, dense with chocolate chunks of varying size; soft and chewy in the middle, with a crunchy yet crisp outer edge. Ideally, a crunch from a roasted nut is present, and always with a generous sprinkling of flakey sea salt on top.

After much testing, I finally came to the recipe that I am sharing with you here. The mixture of brown and white sugars helps to produce that combination of chewy and crisp, and a good log chill in the fridge helps to enhance the texture and flavour. I recommend 5-24 hours in the fridge - due to the use of melted butter, the finished mixture is quite soft, so it really does need that time before shaping and baking.

When I was testing this recipe, I used only caramelised white chocolate and roasted pecans as add ins, which I adore. You can however change the chocolate, forego the nuts, and so on - this iteration pictured uses both caramelised white chocolate and dark chocolate - but I would recommend sticking to the quantities as stated. For example, if you just wanted to use dark chocolate, then use 175g.

For extra crisp and crunch on the outer edge, I remove the cookies after 10 minutes of baking and bang the pan a few times on a flat surface. This creates a ripple to the edge, and is a method I discovered via Sarah Kieffer.

You can buy caramelised white chocolate, or make it yourself using white chocolate. This guide to how to do this is great: https://buttermilkbysam.com/how-to-caramelize-white-chocolate/