Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies with Walnuts

Crisp and crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle, these cranberry white chocolate cookies with walnuts are delicious. They’re also quite robust and hold together well, which makes them ideal candidates to be packed up as festive gifts. You’ll also find a Christmas recipe book review if you’re interested.

Unfortunately the book mentioned above didn’t arrive in time to be particularly useful for Christmas. It’s a little book containing 200 Christmas recipes in the Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook series. There must have been some sort of glitch in the despatch system. Because I didn’t receive the book, sent by Octopus Publishing for review, until a couple of days before Christmas. I did, however, manage to squeeze in one recipe. It was destined to go into my second batch of hampers.

The mulled wine biscuits sounded very nice. I adapted the recipe, as I always do, and renamed them chocolate, almond and cranberry bites. Sadly, they weren’t a great success. So I ended up filling my hampers with the recipe I’ve included below. The recipe for cranberry white chocolate cookies with walnuts isn’t in the book, but it makes a great Christmas cookie.

200 Christmas Recipes

At only £4.99 I’d say this book is good value for money. It’s quite compact, measuring only 16.5 cm by 14 cm. This is actually a nice portable size and it won’t take up a lot of room on your bookshelf either. As you’d expect from the title, it’s stuffed full of Christmas recipes. It covers everything you’d expect plus quite a bit more.

Despite the name, there aren’t actually two hundred different recipes. But most of the hundred or so recipes there are has a variation which bumps the number up. For example, no self respecting Christmas book would be complete without a recipe for red cabbage and this one does not disappoint. A really interesting recipe for braised red cabbage makes an appearance. It includes beetroot and red wine amongst other ingredients. The variation printed at the bottom of the page is for crunchy red cabbage.

Each recipe has its own double page spread. So the recipe appears on one side and the much sought after full colour picture on the other. This makes it particularly useful for flicking through when you’re in a panic for ideas. The recipes are clear and easy to follow, although perhaps not detailed enough for a complete novice.

Book Chapters

The book starts off with an eight page introduction. This includes tips on such necessities as carving the Christmas bird and making giblet stock for the gravy. As a vegetarian, I don’t really find either of these particularly useful. But the recipe for a Madeira cake to be used as a base for several of the recipes and how to sterilise jars was more my thing.

A big chapter on Christmas fare followed this which included various meat dishes but also plenty to keep vegetarians such as myself happy. Lots of ideas for puddings were also in this section with two Christmas pudding recipes, a traditional one and a last minute one to help out the less organised amongst us. Ricotta and candied fruit slice particularly grabbed my attention.

Other chapters covered: centrepiece cakes, small cakes and cookies, edible gifts and leftover turkey ideas. Plenty there to inspire me for next year and plenty to keep the, errr, chocoholics happy. There is even a recipe for fruit & nut discs which is very similar to my glitzy mendiants.

A recipe for ginger nightlights particularly caught my eye. It’s a lovely idea which uses gingerbread with boiled sweet panes for the tea lights to glow through. With lots of choice and not much time, I was torn between panforte de Siena and the mulled wine biscuits which I eventually went for – only I used sherry rather than red wine. Port and cherry cookies were the alternative version offered and if I’d had any dried cherries to hand I might well have used those instead.

Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies with Walnuts

These cranberry white chocolate cookies with walnuts are an awful lot easier to make than the chocolate, almond and cranberry bites. They are a lot nicer too, both in flavour and in texture. In fact, they’re perfect cookies to get your kids involved in baking. Sometimes simple is the way to go.

You could use white chocolate chips for this recipe, but I find a bar of chocolate works better. If you chop the chocolate with a knife, you get all sorts of different sized pieces which makes the biscuits more interesting.

The main thing to watch out for with these cookies is spacing them well apart on the baking sheet. They don’t spread massively, but they do spread enough to catch you out, if like me, you try and cram too many onto one sheet. Once you’ve made the mixture, roll teaspoonfuls into balls between the palms of your hands. Place them on the baking tray then flatten them slightly with the back of a spoon.

They are crisp and crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle with nubbly bits of walnuts, white chocolate and cranberries to keep them interesting. The white chocolate caramelises and gives a lovely contrast to the tart cranberries and the walnuts give a delightful crunch. The cookies are also quite robust and hold together well, which makes them ideal candidates to be packed up as festive gifts for Christmas or any other occasion.

The biscuits will store well in an air tight tin for a week, but the outside will lose it’s crispness. You’ll still be left with a delightfully chewy cookie though.

Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies with Walnuts – The Recipe

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5 from 1 vote

Cranberry White Chocolate Cookies with Walnuts

Crisp and crunchy on the outside and chewy in the middle, these cookies are easy to make and delicious. They're also quite robust and hold together well, which makes them ideal candidates to be packed up as festive gifts.

Prep Time25 mins

Cook Time12 mins

Total Time37 mins

Course: Afternoon Tea, Snack

Cuisine: British

Keyword: biscuits, Christmas, cookies, cranberries, gifts, walnuts, white chocolate

Servings: 36 cookies

Author: Choclette @ Tin and Thyme

Ingredients

• 125 g unsalted butter
• 175 g light brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150 g wholemeal spelt flour
• ½ tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp sea salt (I use pink Himalayan rock salt)
• 75 g rolled oats
• 50 g dried cranberries
• 50 g walnuts - roughly chopped
• 100 g white chocolate - roughly chopped (I used Green & Black’s)

Instructions

• Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
• Beat in the egg and vanilla extract.
• Mix in the flour, baking powder, salt and rolled outs.
• Stir in the cranberries, white chocolate and walnuts.
• Form the dough into balls, roughly walnut size.
• Place on well apart on lined baking sheets and flatten slightly with the back of a spoon.
• Bake in a preheated oven for 12 mins at 180℃ (350℉, Gas 4) until golden in colour.
• Let cool for a few minutes then remove with a spatula onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Notes

If destined for gifts, package into cellophane bags, label and tie with a ribbon. Alternatively place in a pretty tin or box lined with greaseproof paper.