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Brown Butter Salted Caramel Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Published: Nov 14, 2018 · Modified: Jan 31, 2021 by Erin · This post may contain affiliate links · 45 Comments

Brown Butter Salted Caramel Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Regular pantry staples are elevated to another level to give this cookie a 'fancy with only a little more effort' vibe. Brown butter is stirred in with toasty muscovado sugar to form a perfect cookie dough, and then hard caramel shards and chocolate chunks are folded in to give the perfect amount of chocolate and caramel per bite. Finished with flaky sea salt, this is a super easy yet satisfying baking recipe.

Brown Butter Salted Caramel Cookies

Earlier this year, I spent a long time recipe testing to come up with what I consider to be my perfect chocolate chip cookie. I took a couple of different ‘fomocookie’ recipes, took what I liked from each, then tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until I found something that I considered to be perfect. I have since learnt, that while that one recipe IS perfect (to me, anyway), there are a whole bunch of iterations of chocolate chip cookies that are also perfect. Changing up the fats used (such as subbing olive oil), adding mix-ins, and browning the butter, along with playing around with the egg, sugar, flour and leavening agent ratios, all can give you variations on a perfect cookie. And today, I learnt that browning the butter, and stirring in chunks of salted caramel into a chocolate chunk filled cookie mixture, also yield a very, very perfect cookie.

I have teamed up with Sunspire and The Feedfeed to bring you this take on a classic chocolate chip cookie. I wanted something elevated, and a little fancy, but not something that required crazy ingredients that would leave you with a nearly full bag of something weird in your cupboard for the next year - the kind of fancy you could achieve with pantry staples. Like when you wear jeans around the house instead of yoga pants kind of fancy. You’ve made a little effort, but didn’t have to go out of your way to achieve it. Just me? Thought so.

I achieved this little bit of fancy by taking ingredients that are already in cookies, and elevating them slightly. I browned the butter, which adds a beautiful toasty note to the cookies, and complimented it with muscovado sugar in the dough. I then made a quick hard caramel, let it set, then bashed it up into chunks. The caramel chunks were stirred through the mixture, along with some Sunspire 44% Chocolate Chunks - the chocolate is beautiful and smooth, and one bag is the perfect size for a batch of cookies! The caramel is the ultimate bestie for the chocolate chunks - it is chewy and crunchy, adding texture alongside the smooth taste of the chocolate.

These cookies really don’t take a huge amount of extra work, but the few extra steps really do make a huge difference. I also did a bunch of tests and found that the dough can be baked off without a resting period, which means cookies in an instant. The best.

A few wee tips for Brown Butter Salted Caramel Cookies

I have posted the recipe here in grams because that is how I tested it - lots of people don’t realise, but as little as 50g of flour makes a huge amount of difference when it comes to the texture of your cookie, so weighing your ingredients removes the margin of error that comes with measuring by volume. That, and there are far less dishes to do! I would rather you spend $10 on a scale than on ingredients for a cookie that didn’t work out because you didn’t measure your ingredients properly.
You will see that there are two different weights of butter called for in the recipe - the starting weight of 225g, and the 175g of brown butter called for in the recipe. When you brown butter you cook off the water, so the starting weight and ending weight are different. The initial quantity of butter accounts for this moisture loss. Measure out 175g of the brown butter to use for your cookie recipe.
Don’t be intimidated by the extra steps of browning the butter and making the caramel. They don’t add a huge amount more time, and you can make the caramel while the brown butter cools!
I like to chop my chocolate so that you have both shards and chunks. You can also use a baking bar here and chop it roughly using a sharp knife (Sunspire also does a great one).
This recipe does make quite a few cookies (never a bad thing), but if you would like to bake some later, you can roll the dough into balls, place on a lined sheet tray, then freeze until solid before transferring to an airtight bag in the freezer. Add a minute or two onto the bake time to account for the frozen dough.

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Thank you so much to Sunspire and the Feedfeed for sponsoring this post! All opinions are my own.