Maple Walnut Cookies
Soft brown sugar cookies flavoured with pure maple syrup and studded with toasted walnuts, baked for 12 minutes.
Photograph credit: Walnut Cookies by Choo Yut Shing · CC BY 2.0 · Flickr
Maple Walnut Cookies: Step by Step
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Boil the 120 ml maple syrup in a small pan for 5 minutes until reduced by a third. Cool completely.
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Heat the oven to 170°C / 340°F and line 2 trays. Beat the butter and brown sugar for 3 minutes. Beat in the reduced syrup, egg and vanilla.
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Stir in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt, then fold in the walnuts.
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Drop 24 rounded tablespoons onto the trays, 5 cm apart. Bake for 12 minutes until the edges are barely golden.
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Cool on a rack. Whisk the icing sugar, 1 tbsp maple syrup and milk and drizzle over the cooled cookies.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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Keep an Eye on These
- Reduce the maple syrup before using it.
- Bake at a lower temperature.
- Use pure maple syrup, not pancake syrup.
About This Recipe
Keep the heat low. That is most of the recipe, and the part people skip: maple syrup caramelises and burns at a lower temperature than plain sugar, so these cookies bake at 170°C / 340°F, not 180°C / 355°F, and come out when the edges are only just golden. A hotter oven turns the maple flavour acrid.
Use pure maple syrup, not pancake syrup. Pancake syrup is mostly corn syrup with flavouring, and it does not have the depth of the real thing. Dark or very dark syrup, formerly labelled grade B, has the strongest flavour and survives baking best. A tablespoon of maple extract strengthens it further if you want a more pronounced note.
Reduce the syrup before using it. Boil 120 ml of syrup in a small pan for about 5 minutes until it has reduced by a third, then cool. This concentrates the flavour and cooks off some water, so the dough does not become wet. Without this step, the maple is faint and the cookies spread too far.
Toast the walnuts in a dry pan for 4 minutes until they smell warm. Their slight bitterness balances the sweetness. A maple glaze brushed over the cooled cookies, made with icing sugar and a spoon of syrup, adds a second layer of flavour.
To Go With It
Hot tea · Coffee · Cold milk · Vanilla ice cream
Keeping Maple Walnut Cookies
Keeps in an airtight tin for 5 days.
Common Questions
How long does Maple Walnut Cookies take to make?
15 minutes of preparation and 12 minutes of cooking, so at least 27 minutes. The method also needs time for cooling completely, which it does not time, so treat that as a minimum. The recipe serves 24.
What's in a Serving
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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