Best White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookie Bake Off

Looking for the best white chocolate macadamia nut cookie recipe? I tested 9 different recipes in search of the chewiest, chunkiest, fudgiest white chocolate macadamia cookies!

Over my 8 years of conducting these bake offs, I’ve covered many cookie recipes. However, I’ve left the search for a classic white chocolate macadamia nut cookie to the wayside for years simply because I’ll always reach for a chocolate chip cookie, peanut butter cookie or oatmeal cookie first.

However, upon finally embarking on the search for the best white chocolate macadamia nut cookie, I realized that there is a certain charm and nostalgic flavor to these cookies. The white chocolate is sweet, yes, but generally well-balanced by the saltiness of the macadamia nuts. And there are lots of different versions and textures–so whether you’re looking for a fudgy, chewy, doughy, crisp, thick or thin cookie, there’s something for everyone in this bake off. Let’s dive into the comparison of all 9 recipes I tested!

Methodology

• I baked all 9 cookies in one day (the same day of tasting for freshness)
• 61 total tasters rated samples of all 9 cookies
• Each taster rated each cookie on a scale from 0-10 for flavor, texture and overall as a whole (see Results section below for the overall ratings)
• Ingredients were measured by weight according to King Arthur (unless the recipe specified weights)

Ingredients

• Gold Medal bleached all-purpose flour
• King Arthur unbleached cake flour
• Kirkland unsalted butter
• Kerrygold unsalted butter
• Kirkland salted macadamia nuts
• Tony’s Chocolonely white chocolate
• Good and Gather baking chips
• Kirkland vanilla extract
• Diamond Crystal kosher salt

Results

This was another interesting bake off with lots of the final scores clustered together. After summarizing the ratings from all 61 (!! the highest amount of tasters ever, I think) tasters, you can see that Domestic Rebel took first place with an average overall rating of 7.2. However, Sarah Kieffer was close behind with a 7.0 rating (and you can see that with rounding, her average flavor/texture ratings look identical to Domestic Rebel).

Overall, there was really only one recipe that many actively didn’t prefer (Serious Eats). So as always, picking the perfect macadamia nut cookie really depends on your flavor and textural preferences. Most cookies fell into variations of doughy or chewy textures.

For a summary of how I’d categorize the recipes and my high level recommendations, see the Recommendations section at the bottom of the post.

Factors in white chocolate macadamia nut cookie recipes

Here are just a few insights I gleaned after testing and tasting all 9 recipes in one day!

Lean on granulated sugar for a sugar cookie vibe

I’m so used to seeing a mix of brown and white sugar in cookie recipes that I was a bit thrown to see a few of these recipes use all brown sugar or all granulated sugar.

As a quick reminder, in cookies, granulated sugar generally contributes to spread and more of a crisp texture (though this depends on other factors). Meanwhile, brown sugar is more hygroscopic than granulated sugar, meaning that it attracts more ambient moisture and thus generally results in a softer cookie texture–plus, the extra molasses in brown sugar adds a caramel-y flavor.

I actually found that for a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie, I slightly preferred the sugar cookie-esque flavor profile of Preppy Kitchen, a recipe that uses 100% granulated sugar. However, this is totally a personal preference–Yossy Arefi’s recipe with 100% brown sugar was almost universally praised by tasters for its incredibly caramelized flavor. (Though some did note that this pushed this cookie more into the flavor profile of a chocolate chip cookie.)

So if you like more of a sugar cookie vibe, try a recipe with all (or a higher proportion) of granulated sugar. If you know you love more caramel notes, look for one with more brown sugar.

However, most recipes combine both brown and granulated sugar for a reason–to achieve a perfectly balanced texture that is both soft and crisp and a flavor that has some molasses notes.

Use a high oven temp for a fudgier middle

In this bake off, most recipes were baked at 350 F except The Domestic Rebel (410) and Sarah Kieffer (400). By raising the oven temperature, these recipes more quickly set the exterior of the cookie, letting the center (where heat can’t penetrate as fast) remain relatively soft.

The Domestic Rebel is a more dramatic example of a crisp outside and gooey middle simply because the size of the cookie balls are much larger. But if you love a soft and fudgy middle, this is a trick you can employ with most cookie recipes to get the best results!

Chopped white chocolate bars can feel less sweet than chocolate chips

In the baking world, it feels like common knowledge that chopped bars of chocolate lend a more gourmet look to cookies. Bars of chocolate rarely have the same stabilizers that chocolate chips do, which leads to appealing pools of melty chocolate. Personally, I always prefer the look of chopped chocolate in a cookie.

Specifically in this bake off, I felt like the cookies with white chocolate chips often leaned too sweet just by virtue of how the chips could clump up in the cookies whereas the chopped chocolate could disperse more evenly. If you’re finding your cookies too sweet, you can obviously try reducing the overall amount of chocolate chips or try swapping in some (or all) chopped white chocolate instead.

Butter and sugar together dictate chewiness

While I searched and searched for a trend that would hint at what led to a chewier vs. doughier texture, there were actually no clear trends. Preppy Kitchen and Sally’s Baking Addiction were clearly the chewiest cookies, but one used creamed butter (PK) while the other used melted butter (SBA). Preppy Kitchen also used all white sugar and a whole egg while Sally uses a mix of brown and white sugar with an extra egg yolk. Cookies that I would classify as soft and somewhat fudgy (Sarah Kieffer, Handle the Heat, Butternut Bakery) used a combination of creamed and melted butter.

My uninspiring conclusion is that the texture is really a result of a lot of factors working together–primarily, the butter and sugar (but also eggs, flour and leavener). Melted butter typically results in denser, fudgier cookies because no air is incorporated, and this combined with a mix of brown and white sugar can give you a moist, chewy texture (a la Sally’s Baking Addiction). Creamed butter, on the other hand, involves whipping a lot of air into the dough which, combined with sugar and egg, can give you a more airy chew (I.e. Preppy Kitchen).

Size of the macadamia nuts matters

I’ve never liked the experience of eating a whole macadamia nut in a cookie. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me until I read Sarah Kieffer’s recipe–but we have free will! Chop your nuts finely if you don’t like big chunks of nuts! It will actually make a huge textural difference!

Depending on the consistency of your white chocolate macadamia nut cookie dough, large chunks of nuts can also stick out awkwardly if the dough is on the thinner side. This is basically just a note to say that if you can always choose how big or small to chop the macadamia nuts despite what the recipe calls for.

Analysis of the best white chocolate macadamia nut cookies

Serious Eats: Slightly sandy, sugary, almost pasty white chocolate-forward cookies

It’s not every day that you find a cookie recipe that completely turns the traditional formula on its head. I was SO excited to try Bravetart’s recipe on Serious Eats that replaces some of the butter in the dough with melted white chocolate in the cookie dough itself to reduce the butteriness and amplify the white chocolate. There’s also a tiny hint of nutmeg in the cookie along with an option to use toasted sugar (I opted for regular sugar since I figured that’s what most people would use).

Stella specifically calls out to use a high-quality white chocolate bar in this recipe with minimum 30% cocoa butter. I admit to checking 5 different stores and finally settling on Tony’s Chocolonely white chocolate bar (which I think may have 28% cocoa butter but now am having a hard time confirming). So the low scores could have definitely been due to baker error with the cocoa content–or tasters simply didn’t like the taste of Tony’s white chocolate because several (including me) didn’t like the underlying flavor of the cookie. I found some odd fruity notes that were distracting to an otherwise very pale, sugar cookie-esque cookie.

Texturally, these had nice crunchy edges but an oddly fudgy texture that verges on pasty with a sugary bite (I.e. you almost feel like you’re crunching on sugar). As a salty-sweet lover, I was also surprised to find this cookie a bit too salty. Sadly, this wouldn’t be a cookie I’d be excited to try again. However, if you’re a white chocolate lover–I think this could be a strong contender to try with your favorite brand.

Taster comments:

• Very soft and buttery, the white chocolate really comes through. Felt undercooked and like I was chewing on sugar granules.
• There was an interesting flavor to this one and at times it felt like a regular sugar cookie. But the texture was great.
• Super sweet, super sugary. This has less of a caramel profile and more of a buttery one, but I do still like it. The white chocolate stayed mysteriously melty. The whole thing tasted like a grocery store cookie.
• Really sweet, crumbly cookie that lacked depth, needs more caramel flavor. The color was super blonde and the texture was soft and somehow sandy throughout, almost cookie dough vibes. Soft, but seemed kind of underdone rather than a “chewy cookie.”
• This cookie had some weird flavor, something marshmallow-y? Not a fan. Saltier than expected. This felt more like a confetti sugar cookie.
• Not only did it taste overly sugary, but it had a marshmallow-esque undertone, floury taste and sugar grain crunch that I did not enjoy.
• Did not care for the flavor–almost artificial aftertaste. Too undercooked, too sweet, sandy texture, don’t love that the white chocolate isn’t in chip form.

Preppy Kitchen: Small, flattish, chewy cookies with a perfectly balanced flavor

In my mind, Preppy Kitchen had perhaps the most standard cookie formula with creamed butter, a whole egg and just a smidge of cornstarch. However, it did stand out as one of three recipes (along with NYT and Serious Eats) that used granulated sugar only, no brown sugar. It also made relatively small cookies–24 cookies to a single batch whereas comparably sized other recipes might make 16.

Admittedly, these baked up looking highly unimpressive. Relatively small and flat with lots of air holes, the lightly chewy dough looked like it was barely holding up chunks of nuts and white chocolate. Many tasters noted that they prefer a thicker cookie texture (as do I, generally). However, there was something about the ratio of relatively thin dough to the mix ins that allowed for what I felt like was a pretty ideal balance where you could taste the dough and the mix ins side by side (rather than one overwhelming the other). And I really liked both the airy chew and the balanced flavor! While I love a thick, doughy cookie, some of the doughier cookies felt overly rich in conjunction with the white chocolate whereas this cookie felt easy and delightful to eat.

A number of tasters remarked on the sweet sugar cookie flavor to these cookies. Some were missing the caramel notes that brown sugar would give these cookies, but I actually liked the purer sugar cookie flavor in combination with the nuts and white chocolate. If you’re looking for a thin and chewy cookie with just a bit of crunch around the edges and a sugar cookie sweetness, these are for you. One of my favorites flavor-wise!

Taster comments:

• This is my “standard” WCMN cookie: a grocery store-like chewiness, size, and texture, but with a clean and not artificial flavor. Not super caramelly flavor. Solid cookie and one of my top picks, especially for a no-frills WCMN recipe!
• I personally like thinner cookies so this is nice. Good ratio of macadamia nuts and chocolate to cookie. It is pretty buttery/rich, could use more salt.
• This gave me classic sugar cookie vibes! Visually very pale, and flavor of the white sugar is prominent. This one was packed with white chocolate. The texture is soft and plush. I did miss the caramelly notes that brown sugar gives, but I still liked this sample!
• Open texture and crumb but chewy. I don’t love it but I do think it’s the platonic ideal of a white chocolate macadamia cookie.
• I liked how sweet it was, wish it was thicker. There’s a toastiness to the edge of these that I LOVE but have no idea how to describe or replicate. But the taste is basically identical to when you slightly over-bake Pillsbury cut-out sugar cookies from the supermarket.
• Flavor is very floury and buttery, reminiscent of a sugar cookie rather than a macadamia nut cookie. Texture is very crispy at the edges and slightly crumbly. I prefer a chunkier cookie. A bit too sweet for my preference.
• Way too thin and crunchy for my liking. I prefer for the cookie to be more doughy when there’s a crunchy component like nuts.

Butternut Bakery: Soft and tender cookies chock-full of mix ins

Butternut Bakery is another brown butter cookie recipe–but this recipe specifically calls for European-style butter which, according to Jenna, provides more flavor and richness thanks to its higher butterfat. The recipe also calls for an egg and egg yolk, brown and white sugar and just a hint of cinnamon. This had one of the higher ratios of butter (25%) and had the lowest ratio of eggs overall (7%).

The result? A thicker, soft-centered cookie with crispy edges that was absolutely PACKED with mix ins. While I’m sure the brown butter dough tasted good, it was hard to discern the flavor because there are just so many chocolate chips and nuts in this cookie (including the extras you press onto the top of the cookies). I tried multiple times to just nibble at the dough and couldn’t really get a handle on the flavor of the dough itself. As a package, the cookie felt quite sweet as it calls for nearly double the amount of chocolate chips to nuts, which means you end up with a mouthful of white chocolate in every bite. More than one taster noted they wished for a better balance of nuts to white chocolate.

The cookie somehow manages to be soft but not overly doughy or gooey in the center. Overall, these didn’t leave me with a strong impression besides having a ton of mix ins. I’d be curious to try these with just 1 cup of white chocolate chips (and keep the original 1 cup of macadamia nuts for a 1:1 ratio).

Taster comments:

• Found my perfect texture! Ideal thickness, tender but deliciously dense with sugar. Ugh love this one so much. Good amount of nutty flavor, but the texture carries this cookie.
• This sample was white chocolate forward, with a pleasantly crumbly texture. I thought it had a nice salt balance. Something about it was extra caramel-ish to me. Maybe browned butter? I thought it tasted homemade, in a nice way.
• It had an undertone slightly reminiscent of [Serious Eats], which I can’t quite put my finger on. Great chip/nut to dough ratio.
• The texture on this one is very nice – soft and chewy with a light crumb and slightly crispy edges. The flavor is less rich on this one than on number 6 and has a strangely distinct butter note in the aftertaste
• Breaks apart upon touching it, very soft and way more white chocolate chips than macadamia nuts, very butter-forward. I wish the edges were crispier.
• The texture was good but there were too many white chocolate chips and not enough nuts, making each bite a bit too sweet.
• Crispier cookie that was fine but kind of crumbled apart in my hand which was hard to eat. It felt overstuffed.

Sally’s Baking Addiction: small crisp-edged cookies with a strong chew

Sally’s recipe was actually the only recipe to use regular melted butter (not browned) which she says results in an extra buttery flavor as well as a chewier texture. She also calls for an extra egg yolk for richness and chew, a 1:1 ratio of brown and white sugar, and a smidge of cornstarch for softness. Sally also says increasing the baking soda in these cookies help with volume rather than letting the cookies spread excessively.

And though at first glance, the ratios in Sally’s cookie looked pretty standard, I was shocked at how different the texture of these were compared to the rest! These were around the same size as Preppy Kitchen but had a very different chewiness. To me, these had the best textural contrast if you like a crispy edge but a chewy center (whereas Preppy Kitchen was mostly chewy with a bit of crisp around the edges). Most cookies in this bake off tended to lean doughy, but this was definitely the model of a perfect CHEWY cookie.

Flavor-wise, this was another one I enjoyed because you could actually taste the dough (a straightforward butterscotch-y sweetness with a perfect balance of salt) alongside the mix ins. Obviously one for chewy cookie lovers!

Taster comments:

• Very good texture, color and flavor. Could have a little bit of salt to bring out the white chocolate more. Good butter flavor, hits in the middle of the bite and causes all the flavors to bloom. Flavor wise, spot on.
• Crunchier cookie like a butterscotch note and texture, not as sweet, and a nuttier profile. I like this one a lot.
• very chewy/bendy cookie, thin, this one tastes much sweeter than others but that may be because there is more white chocolate in this cookie
• Chewier and less crumbly than [Preppy Kitchen], I like this one slightly better. Managed to have a gradient of crispy to chewy in one bite, which I liked.
• The texture was chewy and nice and the sweetness was at a good level. The cookie itself reminded me of a chocolate chip cookie but with white chocolate.
• Cookie was harder than I would have liked. Buttery, sweet but not too sweet flavor but the dry and chewy texture brought the ranking down.

New York Times: Thin, buttery, crunchy-edged cookies with doughy centers

Many people requested that I test this brown butter cookie from Sohla El-Waylly. And it has a few intriguing qualities–adding milk powder into the browned butter for extra flavor, a mix of vanilla and almond extract, a mix of baking powder and baking soda and granulated sugar only (no brown sugar). It also calls for whipping the sugar and butter together for 6 minutes to dissolve the sugar and create a chewier texture. After portioning the dough into 1/4 cup balls, the cookie dough balls get chilled for at least 12 hours, then sprinkled with flaky salt before baking.

First off: these cookies are MASSIVE–bigger than palm-sized when it comes to my own hand. Though I love a large cookie, these baked up so large and flat that I found them a bit unwieldy and especially prone to cracking after the first day. After the initial puff from the oven, they settle into a thinnish cookie with dense, slightly doughy centers and a juicy chew on day one (which quickly dried out by day 2). Though the edges are obviously crisp, they somehow lacked the crunchy contrast of Sally’s cookies, for example. These have a really nice buttery flavor and I loved the hint of almond that came through. But like some other tasters, I found the flaky salt on top almost pushed these into the realm of too salty.

Overall, these were great on day 1, but my hot take is they’re just too large! I think a slightly smaller cookie would keep better on day two. While these are delicious cookies, they felt like an oversized amount of effort for the payoff compared to some of the simpler recipes.

You can find an un-paywalled version of the recipe here.

Taster comments:

• Loved this cookie! It’s my fav bc it’s perfectly chewy throughout and had a well-balanced and nicely salted flavor with slight caramel notes but not too much. The white chocolate disks were lovely bc it distributed the white chocolate throughout the cookie more evenly. It is also gorgeous and is my pick for a “bakery-style” cookie.
• I like how it is flat but still chewy and I like how it has the bigger chocolate chunks spread throughout the cookie. As a big fan of almond flavor, LOVE the touch of almond extract.
• The big one! Points for size, points for pools of white chocolate, points for crispy edges. My issue with this cookie is those huge macadamia mountains protruding from the cookie. Might just be personal preference, but I’d rather them integrated better into the cookie.
• Very chewy, a little doughy/dense yet thin with crispy yet dry edges. It almost sticks to my teeth in the first few bites. It’s a very salty cookie. Mix-in distribution is weirdly only in the center, so majority of cookie doesn’t have any chocolate or nuts, which was a little strange. Not my favorite.
• Very salty in flavor. It has a ton of spread and is slightly tough. Overall flavor is good, butter forward. The pools of white chocolate are a little sweet for me.
• It seemed like some recipes were more ‘sugar cookie style’, with less browning intended. This one was the best of those, but I prefer the more caramel-y toast-y flavors. Cookie felt overbaked and flat.

Handle the Heat: The epitome of a thick, soft, doughy-centered cookie

Handle the Heat’s recipe stood out to me for its high flour percentage. It’s tied with Serious Eats for the highest percentage of flour (38%), but HTH follows a more conventional cookie formula with creamed butter, a mix of brown and white sugar, and an extra egg yolk (no melted chocolate in the dough like Serious Eats). If you scan HTH against Sarah Kieffer’s recipe, they look similar at face value (both have a 1:2 ratio of granulated to brown sugar and an extra egg yolk), but Sarah’s recipe has a higher overall sugar percentage of 38% while HTH lands around 32%.

And in the end, both Sarah Kieffer and Handle the Heat ended up with similar textures–both are thick, soft and doughy. However, Handle the Heat uses nearly double the amount of mix ins, leading to cookies that were slightly chunkier and felt notably sweeter from all the sweet white chocolate chips. Similar to Butternut Bakery, it felt harder to discern the flavor of Handle the Heat’s dough through all the mix ins.

To me, this was the textbook example of a perfectly soft-baked, almost underbaked texture with a doughy center. (Almost like an Otis Spunkmeyer cookie but with a far more delicious homemade flavor?? The picture-perfect aesthetic of this cookie calls to mind a grocery store-like cookie, and I mean that as a compliment–we’re not talking flavor.) Personally, I might make these with slightly less mix ins next time to be able to taste more of the dough.

Taster comments:

• Liked the texture here! The slightly under baked doughy cookie is great. Flavor is decent too. If this cookie had the flavor of [Yossy Arefi] then it would be the winner.
• This sample was doughy and satisfying with a melt-in-your-mouth texture. Nicely buttery flavor, soft texture, with a nicely balanced amount of fillings.
• Perfect level of sweet where it is not too overpowering. Very good texture, perfect cookie size with a thick middle. Good ratio of chips to nuts.
• Really nice supermarket bakery-type texture that is thick and soft but stays together. On the sweeter one-note side, but if you like supermarket bakery cookies, this one is for you
• Thicker cookie texture reminds me of blondies. Flavor is just okay and a bit too sweet for me.
• Too doughy, like a sugar cookie. A bit undercooked or just too soft for my taste
• There’s a slight doughiness/pastiness to this one that I personally really dislike in cookies. With the popularity of thick, rich cookies, I’ve noticed there’s a range of what that richness looks like. Sometimes it’s just intense in flavor and other times, you have different kinds of textural density that result in that richness. Personally, if a dough feels almost underbaked to me in that it’s slightly pasty, I’m not a huge fan.

Yossy Arefi: a thin and chewy cookie that stood out for its caramelized flavor

Yossy’s recipe was one of three brown butter cookies, but the only one to use all brown sugar (NYT uses granulated sugar only; Butternut Bakery uses both). Similar to Cook’s Illustrated chocolate chip cookie recipe, this requires browning most of the butter but reserving a bit to stir in at the end, which helps cool down the hot brown butter. Besides browning the butter, this is a total no-fuss recipe that comes together easily and barely needs to be chilled before baking.

Texturally, this reminded me a bit of Preppy Kitchen but even thinner and accordingly, a bit bendier. Extremely crunchy edges surround a delicately airy, chewy middle (as opposed to the doughier/soft-baked chews of Sally’s Baking Addiction and Sarah Kieffer). The all-brown sugar gave these a caramel-y brown butter flavor that comes through the more you chew. Tasters were split between praising this as their “ideal texture” (thin, chewy, not too heavy) and wanting a thicker/chewier cookie. However, tasters almost universally loved the flavor–the only gripe that came from a few tasters was that this felt more like a chocolate chip cookie base than a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie.

While I fall into the camp of wanting a slightly thicker, chewier cookie, this cookie has an undeniably delicious caramelized flavor. A great pick for those looking for a thin and chewy cookie!

Taster comments:

• This was easily my favorite. The cookie itself had so much flavor, rich and satisfying. Perfect balance of chewy and crunchy, big chunks of nuts, and the white chocolate melted in and didn’t overpower.
• Love this guy! Beautiful, buttery, caramel flavor. Some crispness to it as well as the classic chew of wcm. The most complex of all the samples! I would put anything in that dough.
• My ideal texture: thin, chewy, moist but not wet. These days, this is exactly the type of cookie I want — a quick snack that doesn’t feel like it has to scream that it’s tasty by way of heaviness.
• This sample was thin and flat with a nice chew and slight crunch. The flavor of the cookie base was pleasantly caramel-forward. Although thin/crunchy/chewy is not typically my preferred texture in a cookie, something about this was addictively snackable!
• My favorite so far, I think this cookie has great flavour (brown butter?) and I actually taste more cookie here. Though would have loved a thicker and chewier cookie
• This one was yummy, but it wasn’t a WCMN cookie vibe. It had a super caramelly and nicely salted flavor, but the flavor of the cookie felt more like a CCC recipe w white chocolate and nuts mixed in. Very nice rippled chewy texture and the thinness was ideal. I like this as a cookie, but wouldn’t rank it highly as my WCMN cookie
• This has a nice deeper, more caramelized dough flavor and chewier texture, though leans too thin and chewy. The lower ratios of mix-ins detracts from both texture and flavor.

Sarah Kieffer: the ultimate soft and fudgy cookies with small bits of nuts and chopped chocolate

Sarah’s cookie stood out for a seemingly small detail: rather than a rough chop, she calls for finely chopped macadamia nuts which she says helps not overwhelm the cookies. And this really resonated with me–I don’t love biting into a whole macadamia nut poking out of the middle of a cookie. Aside from this detail, the base dough is similar to Handle the Heat. Both use creamed butter, egg yolks and similar ratios of butter and flour, though Sarah uses more sugar overall, less egg and slightly less butter (for one of the lowest ratios of butter total).

The resulting cookie felt fitting to come from a recipe developer who has a full cookbook on cookies–it’s a picture-perfect medium thickness with lovely ripples on top and a doughy, fudgy center. To me, this dough had the ideal balance of brown butter, vanilla, salt and sweetness. The cookie did feel similar but distinct to Handle the Heat—perhaps because this uses chopped white chocolate instead of chips, it felt less sweet and overwhelmed with white chocolate so you can really taste the dough.

I also liked the small texture of the macadamia nuts–it helped make the cookie feel more cohesive rather than having large lumps of nuts sticking out. However, some tasters commented it felt like there weren’t enough nuts–so if you like a lot of mix ins, consider bumping up the amount of nuts in this cookie (the amount used is relatively low). A perfect speciman if you love a soft and fudgy cookie!

Taster comments:

• Very nice flavor, rich but balanced. The saltiness is a nice component of this cookie. Texture is soft and chewy with a nicely caramelized bottom, though slightly too underbaked in the center. One of our favorites!
• Loved the look and cracks on this cookie. The texture was ideal nice and chewy on the edges, with a slight caramelly flavor that made it delicious, but still retained its WCMN identity. It was nicely dense and flat and has a very classic vibe. This is my fav “classic and not fancy” version.
• I liked this cookie! It had a doughier and slightly more unctuous texture with a soft middle, and I really enjoyed the hit of sea salt on top. Good balance of sweetness
• Really good cookie. Liked that the nuts were broken up and the flaky salt on top. I would have liked if there was a bit more of the nuts and chocolate – didn’t have as much as all other samples.
• Really tasty brown buttery flavor, still very sweet but more complex. Good if you like a doughy but chewy cookie. Would prefer more mixins.
• Nice ripples and soft/chewy, but a bit doughy/raw tasting, very small chunks of fillings rather than whole nuts and chips which causes it to be one-note sweet

The Domestic Rebel: the ultimate thick and doughy cookie with gooey centers

While it feels unfair to include “Levain-style” cookies in these tests, I couldn’t not include these once I saw them. And once again, this taste test proved that monstrously large (nearly hand-sized), thick and gooey-centered cookies will generally win over most tasters. These use a slightly higher ratio of brown to white sugar, whole eggs and a mix of all-purpose and cake flour with a teaspoon of cornstarch. They get baked up in giant, lightly chilled 6 oz balls at the highest heat (410 F) for just 8-12 minutes to ensure lightly browned exteriors with soft, gooey interiors.

I was recently talking to a friend about how the size of a cookie really matters in certain recipes. If you were to bake these cookies in, say, 1 oz balls, you’d lose the symphony of textures that you get with an oversized ball of dough. The large size allows these to have thick middles, crisp bottoms and edges contrasted with really doughy centers and a decently cakey mid-ring. (In contrast to NYT’s cookie which, while very large, somehow ends up with a lot of the same texture.) I personally LOVE a gooey center and loved these cookies, though some tasters were a bit turned off by how soft they were in the middle. However, you can adjust to taste when baking–if they’re still looking too raw in the center, lower the bake temp to 375 and bake until the centers look done to your liking.

Flavor-wise, I felt these were a little more bland than Preppy Kitchen, but still packed with enough mix ins to command a decent amount of flavor. For some reason, although multiple recipes have a 1:1 ratio of white chocolate to macadamia nuts, multiple tasters reported feeling like there was a higher ratio of nuts to chocolate in these cookies. Perhaps chopping the nuts even smaller could help with dispersion and helping even out the nut to chocolate bites.

Overall, these are crowd-pleasing oversized cookies that are perfect for thick and gooey-centered cookie lovers!

Taster comments:

• This might be my ideal cookie, it’s doughy, chewy, and the perfect thickness. I like how it has some caramelized notes to it and a good amount of salt.
• This sample was dense and weighty and delicious. It gave me Levain copycat vibes. I thought it was nice and buttery with a more brown sugary/caramelly flavor. It was packed with goodies! I think a sprinkle of flaky sea salt on top of these would put them pretty close to 10/10 for me.
• I expected this to be gooey and cloying but the concentration of nut and chocolate chunks saved it, so did the salt! My second favorite.
• Toothsome and a little sandy at the edges but also thick and chewy, how can this all be?! Good salt, toasty, golden and visually appealing. Chock full of chips and nuts plus the height and dimension make it the whole package. Not what one usually thinks of for a wcm cookie though.
• This is a taller, denser cookie. I prefer a thinner macadamia nut cookie, but Levain lovers would really enjoy this. There is almost too much white chocolate packed into this cookie, which makes it slightly too sweet, but I enjoyed the overall flavor. I think this would be a delicious bar recipe instead of cookie.
• I liked the crunchy bottom and soft top. Good amount of nuts, could add more chocolate. Perhaps needed a little bit of salt to bring out the richness of the butter which is pretty spot on, but hits towards the end of the bite.
• A little too doughy in the center for me. But the flavor and texture of the edges were perfection.
• CHONKER. Fun to look at, but falls apart too easily and a bit too full of stuff where I feel like I’m eating sweet nut clusters. A bit too doughy and sweet.

Recommendations

• Erika’s picks: Preppy Kitchen, Sarah Kieffer, Handle the Heat
• Crowd favorite: The Domestic Rebel
• For a SUPER thick and gooey cookie: The Domestic Rebel
• For a soft, moderately thick, fudgy-centered cookie: Sarah Kieffer, Handle the Heat, Butternut Bakery
• For a thin and chewy cookie: Yossy Arefi, Preppy Kitchen, NYT
• For a crisp and chewy cookie: Sally’s Baking Addiction
• For a very white chocolate-forward cookie: Serious Eats
• Cookies that don’t require chilling (or minimal chilling): Butternut Bakery, Sarah Kieffer, Yossy Arefi, The Domestic Rebel