Caramel, Pistachio & Sea Salt Cookies

One of my favourite past times is raiding the kitchen, and as I sit on the floor eating my way through something tasty, I think about what I can make with the spoils of my raid. My most recent raid produced caramel and pistachio sea-salt cookies.

I love cookies. As long as something cookie like and tasty enters my mouth, I’m a happy cat.

Just yesterday, the family lawyer came to see my dad and he had brought along an apprentice who was learning the ropes of lawyerdom. I can’t say that I saw either of them because I was still hibernating in my bed but dad told me later that he had offered them a few cookies each.

And do you know what happened?

The apprentice apparently ate not only all his share of cookies, but he also ate his boss’s portion too. Yay.

There is now a big smiley face on the top of this cookie recipe, because clearly it’s a person pleaser and I should make them again.

Initially I was going to make Joy the Baker’s (on a side note I love her >^..^< and it makes me want a kitty of my own so badly *keyboard smashes my sadness away*) Dark Chocolate pistachio smoked sea-salt cookies. This was me under the assumption that I had dark chocolate in the house BUT I DIDN’T. I was sad for about 3 seconds until I found a jar of ‘caramel bits’ where the dark chocolate usually was and I’m happy to say that the dark skies of my mind cleared to make way for the rainbows of hope. This could work, I whispered to myself, as I threw a few caramel bits into my mouth.

After I had taken out my egg and butter out of the fridge and let them get down to room temperature, my kitchen fun began!

I primarily bake and cook for my family. That being the case, I am very careful about what I add into my cooking, and one thing I always try to reduce is the amount of sugar I add in. To me, there is no point of having my parents try food that is high in sugar and then have them panic about their sugar levels and try to suppress it with medicine. I’d rather them not have to resort to medicine at all.

Keeping this in mind, I decided on a 1:1 ratio for sugar and butter. To some, my cookies probably aren’t sweet enough, but when you try to make these cookies, of course you are free to add in however much sugar you like 🙂 I also thought because I used caramel bits which are quite sweet themselves, I thought this would make my cookies sweet enough.

So! This is how my creamed butter, sugar, egg and vanilla looked after I mixed in the dry ingredients of flour, salt, baking soda. It looks ok, right?

I thought that I had a whole cup worth of salted pistachios but it turns out that after shelling, I had barely half a cup. It felt like there was even less when I went and chopped them up. Wah. If I hadn’t told you, you might have thought that the caramels bits were chocolate drops, right? But they really were caramel tasting!

And now, getting cosy with the dough…

After giving everything a good stir to get everything well incorporated, I started to spoon out balls of dough onto my prepared baking trays:

Do you see those speckly white dots all over the tray? That’s sea salt! I was a bit tentative on how much I should put on each cookie, but I think next time, I’m going to get a little more liberal. The next time I might try to get my hands on some smoked sea salt…the idea of smoked sea salt excites me. This was also about the time dad started hanging about in the kitchen, busying himself reading the newspaper and drinking cups of tea. Sneaky dad.

After 18 minutes in the oven and about 10 minutes cooling time, dad was the first one to try a fresh cookie!

Dad really liked the cookies, saying they were lovely and crisp, without being too hard. Proud.baking.moment! 🙂 I can’t tell you whether the cookies ended up getting too hard over the past few days, because even as I write this up now, 2 days after I made them, there are none left.

Not to blow my own trumpet, but these cookies were very good.  As I mentioned earlier, the sea salt cut wonderfully through the sweet taste of the caramel and really complemented the pistachios *pew-pew!* The more I keep looking at the green bits in the picture, I’m reminded more of green vegetables rather than it being pistachios. My sister said the green bits of the cookie made her feel like she was eating healthy. Haha.

As you can see, my cookies turned out to be of the chunky variety. Although that is owing to quite a few factors (like how much of every ingredient I put in etc) it’s also because I made my cookie balls a little bigger than the 2 tablespoons suggested by Joy. Why? Because I only have 2 oven trays and I wanted to get all them cookies done in one go /lazyrepresentyay!

I ended up being able to make 25 Caramel and pistachio sea salt cookies. The recipe is below, so go try this out for yourself and please tell me how it went!

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Caramel, pistachio & Sea Salt Cookies

Adapted from Joy the Baker!
Makes about 24 cookies

Ingredients:

• -1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• -1/4 cup granulated sugar
• -1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• -1 large egg at room temperature
• -1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• -1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• -1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• -1/4 teaspoon salt
• – 3/4 cups caramel drops
• -1/2 cup shelled pistachios, coarsely chopped
• -sea salt for topping

Method:

1. Preheat oven to approx.150 degrees C /300 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat butter and sugars together until pale and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Add the egg and beat in for about 1 minute. Add vanilla extract and beat to incorporated well.
3. In a medium bowl, sift and whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt. Add the mixture all at once to the butter mixture. Beat on low speed until just combined. Finally mix in the chocolate chips and pistachios
4. Scoop and drop about 2 tablespoons of cookie dough onto your prepared baking trays every time, leaving about 2 inches of room between each cookie ball. Sprinkle each ball generously with sea salt.
5. Bake cookies for 18 minutes, or until the cookies become golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the tray for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy!