Salted Caramel Cookies
Chewy brown sugar cookies filled with soft caramel pieces and finished with flaky sea salt, baked for 12 minutes.
Photograph credit: Gourmet Caramel Popcorn Cookies with Toffee Drizzle by Sofia Lonshakova · Pexels License · Pexels
Where This Goes Wrong
Use firm caramel sweets, not sauce.
Seal the caramel completely inside the dough.
Add flaky salt while the cookies are hot.
Making Salted Caramel Cookies
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Beat the butter and both sugars for 2 minutes. Beat in the egg and vanilla.
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Stir in the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Chill the dough for 20 minutes.
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Heat the oven to 180°C / 355°F and line 2 trays. Flatten a tablespoon of dough in your palm, press in some caramel pieces, and seal the dough around them. Roll into 24 balls.
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Place 5 cm apart. Bake for 12 minutes until the edges are golden.
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Sprinkle with the flaky salt straight out of the oven and cool on the trays for 10 minutes.
Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.
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Why It Works
Two kinds of salt, one at each end of the process. A pinch goes into the dough, where it amplifies the flavour of the brown sugar and butter, and a scatter of flaky sea salt goes on top, where it gives a crunch and a sharp, clean contrast to the sweet caramel. Without both, a caramel cookie is just a sweet one.
The caramel is the main event, and the surprise is that it should be firm. Soft caramel sweets, cut into small pieces and pressed into the dough balls, melt in the oven into pockets of molten caramel, while a liquid caramel sauce would leak out and burn on the tray. Choose chewy caramels without a chocolate coating, and chop them into pieces about the size of a pea.
Wrap the dough around each piece of caramel. Take a tablespoon of dough, press a few caramel pieces into the middle, and seal the dough over them. If any caramel sticks out, it will burn on the tray. A little extra dough on top of the caramel seals it in properly.
Bake until the edges are golden and the tops are set. The centres may look slightly puffy. As they cool, the caramel sets again into a chewy centre. Eat them warm for a molten pull, or cold for a firm bite.
After You've Cooked It
Keeps in an airtight container for 4 days.
Good With
- Cold milk
- Coffee
- Vanilla ice cream
- Hot chocolate
Questions and Answers
How long does Salted Caramel Cookies take to make?
25 minutes of preparation and 12 minutes of cooking, plus 20 minutes of chilling, so allow 57 minutes from start to finish. The recipe serves 24.
Nutrition per Serving
Per serving, an approximate calculation from the ingredient list. Treat it as a rough guide: part of the energy comes from foods, or weights per item, with no recorded source. 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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