Waiting for Chocolate Season: White Chocolate and Pretzel Cookies

I use a lot of chocolate. Because I buy couverture chocolate via mail order, I can only get it during cool weather months, which I refer to as "chocolate season." (Out of curiosity, I just went through my email receipts from the most recent chocolate season and tallied up what I purchased: 5 kg Callebaut Velvet white chocolate; 7.5 kg Callebaut Gold caramelized white chocolate; 2.5 kg Cacao Barry Ghana milk chocolate; 3 kg Valrhona Caramelia caramelized milk chocolate; 17.5 kg Callebaut 2815 bittersweet chocolate; and 15 kg Cacao Barry Guayaquil dark chocolate. While my pandemic chocolate usage has been particularly high, it's a little shocking to do the math and realize that that adds up to more than 100 pounds of chocolate.)

Now as we're at the tail end of non-chocolate season, I'm almost out of milk and dark chocolate and I'm strictly rationing out my supplies until chocolate season rolls around again. But I still have plenty of white chocolate and caramelized white chocolate on hand, so I've been baking with white chocolate more frequently than usual. When I came across a recipe from BBC Good Food for "White Chocolate and Pretzel Cookies," it seemed like a perfect baking project not only because I could use up some white chocolate, but also because I happened to have a bag of pretzel balls from nuts.com.

The recipe is super easy. You beat butter with brown sugar and golden sugar until light and fluffy; beat in an egg and vanilla; and mix in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, white chocolate, pretzels, and salt). I used Callebaut Gold caramelized white chocolate callets and left the pretzel balls whole; I reserved some chocolate and pretzels to press on top of the cookies before baking. I used a #24 scoop to portion out the dough and got 14 cookies from a batch.

I really liked the look of the pretzel balls in the finished cookies, as the cookies otherwise would have been fairly monochromatic. The cookies were chewy but had a nice crust on the exterior, and the caramelized white chocolate added a decadent caramel flavor. But the best part was the satisfying salty crunch from the pretzels. In the future, I would add some more pretzels, probably using the full amount specified in the recipe in the batter itself, and then adding extra pretzels on top before baking. I love the combination of salty and sweet, and things that are crunchy -- and this cookies delivers all of that in spades.

 

Recipe: "White Chocolate and Pretzel Cookies" from BBC Good Food.