Salted caramel cookies

If you follow me on instagram, of if you read my earlier post about the Queen's Birthday long weekend, you would know that I am very excited about a new product in the baking world - caramel chips! After this discovery, I spent a week thinking about the cookies that I'd be making - I had planned on making caramel + choc chip cookies, but then, it came from me out of the blue... salted caramel cookies!!!

As it's winter and the temperatures have now dropped and I'm never so organised or patient enough to have butter at that perfect soft stage, I got lazy and improvised - I melted my butter instead of creaming it with the sugar. As a result, the cookies spread out HUGE when they baked, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing... the batch just makes a bigger yield (or in my case, giant sized cookies).

These cookies were amazing - the caramel chips were very sweet, but they were offset perfectly by the salt flakes. These were perfect on a quiet Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea, and would go down really well with a tall glass of milk if that's your kind of thing!

Ingredients

175g butter, melted and cooled
2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup caster sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla essence
1 egg + 1 egg yolk
Caramel chips
Salt flakes

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celsius and line two or three cookie trays with baking paper.
2. In a bowl, beat the melted butter and two sugars until well combined.
3. Add the vanilla essence, the egg and egg yolk and beat again for another minute.
4. Sift the flour into the bowl and beat until all combined - another minute or two.
5. Add the caramel chips to suit your taste (I added 1 cup) and stir with a wooden spoon to combine.
6. If you want giant cookies, use a tablespoon, if you want smaller sized cookies, use a teaspoon to drop balls of batter onto the baking trays. Leave PLENTY of room as these babies grow and spread out!
7. I didn't flatten the cookies at all, instead I added some more caramel chips onto the top for presentation purposes, before grinding some salt flakes onto the top of each cookie.

8. Bake two trays at a time in the oven for 5 minutes, and then swap so they both get equal time at the top & bottom of the oven.
9. Remove from the oven, leave to sit in the hot tray for a few minutes, and then transfer to a wire rack and allow to cool completely.
10. Enjoy!!!

These were an absolute winner - I will definitely be making these again! I gifted most of the cookies away to my best friend and my two brothers, and then regretted it immediately!

thesuzchef x