Hi friends! Once again it’s Monday, but there’s no new meal prep to share – I made way too much last week, so I froze some of it and that’s what I’ll be having this week too! Not too exciting, but so convenient. Instead of meal prep Monday, I want to kickoff a very exciting series – Cookies! I was going to come up with a cute alliterative name for it, but I think cookies speak for themselves well enough.

For the next several (4? 5? who knows!) weeks, I’ll be sharing my favorite cookie recipes. Y’all, I LOVE cookies. They’re so versatile, they freeze well so you can always have some on hand for when you have friends drop by and need a quick treat. Also, I always have the ingredients on hand, so dessert is never far away!

We’re going to start out with honestly my absolute fav cookie recipe – brown butter double chocolate cookies. For these, you can use your go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe and make just a couple of tweaks to really make them outstanding. There are basically 3 elements here: the base recipe, the butter, and the chocolate.

First, let’s talk about the main component: your go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe. Honestly, I have 2: Nestle’s recipe, the one that’s on the back of every bag of chocolate chips, and Sally’s Baking Addiction’s recipe. I haven’t found any changes to either recipe that create a better cookie, other than adding extra vanilla. They’re both great, but the reason why I have 2 is because, as good as Sally’s recipe is, sometimes I just don’t want to wait for my dough to chill! Impatience is a struggle.

The first enhancement – brown butter. I know that browned butter is ~trendy~ right now, but it’s SO GOOD in cookies. I’ll make a big batch of browned butter and keep that in the fridge and use it whenever I would use butter. Sometimes you have to be careful because browned butter has less water content than non-browned butter, but typically it works out just fine. I use the same amount (by weight) of softened browned butter as how much butter the recipe calls for. I don’t suggest taking the amount of butter the recipe calls for (ex. 2 sticks) and just browning those 2 sticks, then chilling and using that because you’ll lose a fair bit of volume in the browning process and the ratio will be off.

To make brown butter, simply melt your butter in a wide pan over medium low heat. Once the butter melts, keep going. It’ll start to foam, then seem to stop, and eventually foam for a second time. After the second foam, things happen pretty fast. Keep an eye on the butter solids, the little white flecks at the bottom of the pan, that have separated from the rest. They’ll slowly, then VERY quickly start to turn brown. If using a dark colored pan, I suggest using a white spatula to stir things to make it easier to see the browning. As soon as you can smell the browned butter and the butter solids are a golden, toasty color, remove from heat and let cool.

The second enhancement – dark and white chocolate chips. I love this combination, although it works best with dark chocolate that’s at least 60% cocoa to balance the sweetness from the white chocolate. I do an even 50/50 split of chocolates to get up to the amount that the recipe calls for. You can absolutely just use whatever chocolate you have on hand though!

These small changes make a huge difference – just look at how good this cookie looks! Below is Nestle’s recipe, by weight, with the changes I make. Let me know if you try it for yourself!

Brown Butter Double Chocolate Chip Cookies