White chocolate, tahini and pretzel cookies
White chocolate, tahini and pretzel cookies
Tahini gives a lovely sweet and salty kick to these crisp, grown-up cookies, while pretzels add extra crunch
Ingredients
- 225 g unsalted butter
- 50 g tahini
- 225 g good-quality white chocolate
- 300 g plain flour
- 2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds plus a few seeds to decorate
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 2 pinches ground cinnamon
- 220 g soft light brown sugar
- 100 g golden caster sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 85 g pretzels roughly broken into shards
Instructions
- Melt the butter and tahini in a pan over a low heat, stirring until melted. Cool for 5 minutes. Keep 25g of the white chocolate for finishing off the cookies, then chop the rest into small chunks.
- Mix together the flour, sesame seeds, bicarb and cinnamon with 1 tsp of salt.
- Put the sugars in a big mixing bowl, pour in the melted butter and beat together with an electric whisk to combine. Add in the eggs and vanilla, and continue to whisk until the mixture pales and starts to thicken. Tip in the dry ingredients and mix in with a wooden spoon until just incorporated, then scatter over 3/4 of both the white chocolate chunks and pretzels, and briefly mix in. Cover the dough and chill for 30-45 minutes until firm enough to spoon with an ice-cream scoop.
- Heat the oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5 and line 2-3 baking sheets with baking paper (see cook’s notes). Use a small-medium ice cream scoop or a tablespooon to spoon out cookie dough balls and space about 10cm apart on the baking sheets. Scatter over the remaining chocolate chunks and pretzels and gently push in, then sprinkle over a few pinches more of the sesame seeds.
- Bake for 9-10 minutes or until the edges are brown but the centres soft still. Finely grate the reserved 25g white chocolate over the cookies as they come out of the oven. Cool on the baking sheets for 10 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.
- NOTE: For cookies that are even in size, shape and texture it’s best to bake one tray at a time on the middle shelf –stacking trays means the cookies at the top and bottom of the oven may be overdone and underdone.
