Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies

Super thick and chewy, these cranberry and white chocolate chip cookies are a holiday favorite.

‘Tis the season to be jolly! With Christmas coming up, I wanted to make these classic cranberry and white chocolate chip cookies for the winter season. If you want to bake something with little effort for the holidays, try these easy cookies!

While I love making fancy truffles and elaborate cut out cookies, I also love the simplicity of a drop cookie. No flouring the surfaces (and getting flour on my floor, pants and hair!) and spending endless hours with royal icing decorations… Christmas simplified. Since my exams and projects are all due in December, I wanted to keep this Christmas season rather simple without huge manic baking sessions that go into the night hours and elaborate dinner plans for Christmas Eve which require a few days of prepping. Nope, this year I am not striving for extraordinary, I am just striving for a nice and quite Christmas. 

With my family back in Austria, it will be our first Christmas alone as a couple here in Switzerland. This means it’s time to set our own new traditions on how to spend the holidays. Since I was raised with a lot of Christmas traditions (decorated house, big tree, Christmas cookie baking sessions,… you know, the whole shebang) there are a bunch of traditions I wish to carry on for my own family. Since Mr. HBB is Slovak by birth, he also brings in new traditions that I am getting to know. While new customs sometimes seem pretty weird (like eating garlic and honey together on a wafer, which is a Slovak Christmas tradition), they also greatly enrich our lives and make us laugh.

But getting back to these delicious cookies right here. If you like thick, chewy and soft cookies, you’ll love these right here! They puff up nicely in the oven, without spreading too much, which makes them suuuuper fat and delicious. The white chocolate chips, or in my case white chocolate chunks since I couldn’t find any chocolate chips here in Switzerland, compliment the sour cranberries incredibly well. It’s such a heavenly combo!

Soft Cookies

The first secret to getting fat and chewy cookies is chilling the dough sufficiently before baking the cookies. This prevents them from spreading too much and crisping up too much. The second secret is to shape them rather like a tower than a round ball. This also helps the cookies to remain nice and thick in the center so you get that chewy texture. 

If you love soft cookies, be sure to give these Soft and Tall Snickerdoodles a try! 

Baking Time

If you are making the cookies medium size like the recipe calls for, you’ll need to bake them 10 minutes on the middle rack. Take them out while they are still soft. Yup, that step is a bit confusing. The cookies actually harden as they cool on the baking sheet. If you’d bake them till they are done, you’d end up with incredibly crispy cookies, which is not what we are going for here. Since oven times vary, depending on the strength of the oven, I always like to do a test run. Simply bake one cookie for the recommended time and let it cool completely. If you are happy with the texture, bake all the other cookies for the same exact time.

If you give these Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies a try, let me know in the comment section down below! 

Happy Holidays! ❄️

Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies

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• Prep Time: 25 minutes
• Cook Time: 10 minutes
• Total Time: 2 hours (includes chilling time)
• Yield: 20 cookies 1x

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Ingredients

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• 170g butter (1.5 sticks), softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 100g granulated white sugar (1/2 cup)
• 90g brown sugar (1/2 cup)
• 1 egg, room temperature
• 240g flour (2 cups)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup white chocolate chips

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Instructions

1. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and vanilla until pale and fluffy.
2. Add the white sugar and brown sugar and continue beating for 1 minute. Then add the egg and beat until smooth.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, cornstarch and salt until well combined.
4. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and mix on low speed until you have a smooth dough.
5. Lastly fold in the dried cranberries and white chocolate chips. Tightly cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough chill for 2 hours or up to 3 days.
6. Preheat the oven to 180C (350F) and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
7. Scoop out about 1 tablespoon of dough and shape into little towers (see picture above). Place the cookie towers on a baking sheet, making sure to leave enough space between each cookie.
8. Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes, until the edges are browned. Cookies will still be soft in the center when removed from the oven but will set as they cool.

Notes

This recipe yields 20 cookies. The cookies on the picture are extra large (one batch yielded 12 cookies) which I baked for 15 minutes.

Store cookies at room temperature for up to 1 and 1/2 weeks, or freeze for up to 3 months.