Chocolate, Macadamia Nut & Cranberry Cookies

A couple of weeks back I made Chocolate & Macadamia Cookies following a Waitrose recipe card.

They were good but not perfect.

Since then I have made the recipe twice more...tweaking each time and now I think I have nailed it. I've even added an extra flavour to make them more seasonal which I think works really well.

As I am a nut lover, I've also made the cookies more "macadamery" by adding some at the butter creaming stage as well as adding them later in larger chunks.

Here's my recipe:

Chocolate, Macadamia & Cranberry Cookies
Make approx 18 cookies

Ingredients:
115g softened butter
60g icing sugar, sifted
120g plain flour
20g cocoa powder (I used Green & Black's)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (I love this stuff)
75g white cooking chocolate (I used Green & Black's)
75g macadamia nuts
50g dried cranberries or dried cherries

Method:

• Pre-heat oven to  180°C / 356F / Gas Mark 4.
• In a food processor, cream together the butter and icing sugar.
• Add the vanilla and 25g of the macadamia nuts. Whizz together until the nuts are barely distinguishable.
• Sift together the flour and cocoa powder and blend into the creamed butter. The mixture should be pretty thick at this point.
• Roughly chop the macadamias and white chocolate. For best result,  leave them in quite large chunks - I cut each macadamia in half and each chocolate "square" into quarters.
• Mix this into your cookie dough along with the cranberries.
• Have your baking trays ready (I needed 2) lined with grease proof paper or whatever way you usually like to bake your cookies.
• Now take a spoonful of your mixture, about the size of a large walnut, and roll into a ball (the original recipe suggests you dust your hands with cocoa but I found this made little difference but a lot of mess!). Place balls on the baking sheet...making sure you leave enough room between cookies for them to "spread" during cooking.
• Once you've rolled out all your dough, flatten each ball slightly with a fork. If the ball crack or splits at the sides, simply mould it back into shape - the dough it quite malleable.
• Place in the oven and cook for 12-14 minutes. Check regularly as they can overcook very quickly near the end.
• Once you've taken them out of the oven, do not try to transfer them to the cooling rack straight away as they are very fragile when hot and break up easily. Instead, leave them to cool on the tray for about 5 minutes, then carefully transfer them to the cooling rack using a spatula or fish slice.
• When cooled they are much tougher cookies :-) and also extrememly moreish!