Salted Toffee Cookies with Pretzels and Peanuts
A brown sugar drop cookie with chopped toffee bars, crushed pretzels and salted roasted peanuts folded through, so every bite is sweet and salty at once. No dough chilling, and an extra yolk keeps the middles soft for three days.
Ingredients
The Dough
- 1 cup unsalted butter 2 sticks, room temperature and still firm enough to hold a dent
- 3 cups all-purpose flour about 375 grams, spooned into the cup and leveled
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 3/4 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt or 1 teaspoon Morton
- 1 cup packed dark brown sugar dark, not light
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 2 large eggs room temperature
- 1 large egg yolk the extra yolk is what keeps the middles soft
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
The Mix-Ins
- 5 ounces chocolate-covered toffee bars about 1 cup, chopped into rough 1/4-inch pieces
- 2/3 cup pretzel sticks crushed coarse, to about pea size
- 2/3 cup salted roasted peanuts roughly chopped, not honey roasted
- 1 tablespoon flaky sea salt for pressing onto the tops before baking
Instructions
Mix the Dough
- Heat the oven to 350F and line two sheet pans with parchment. Whisk the flour, baking soda, baking powder and kosher salt together in a bowl and set it aside.
- Beat the butter with both sugars on medium for a full 3 minutes, until it is visibly paler and has grown in volume. This is the only aeration the cookies get, so do not cut it short.
- Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each, then the extra yolk and the vanilla. Add the dry mixture in three additions on low speed, stopping the moment the last streak of flour disappears.
Fold in the Crunch
- Take the bowl off the mixer. Fold in the chopped toffee, crushed pretzels and peanuts by hand with a wooden spoon until they are evenly spread, no longer.
- A mixer will grind the pretzels to powder in seconds, which costs you the texture the whole cookie is built around.
Scoop and Bake
- Scoop tablespoon-and-a-half balls onto the pans, 12 to a sheet. Tuck any toffee shards sticking out of a ball back into the dough, then press a few flakes of sea salt onto each top.
- Bake 12 to 14 minutes, rotating the pans once, until the edges are golden and matte and the centers still look slightly underdone and puffed. They will look wrong. Take them out anyway.
- Leave them on the hot pan for 5 minutes to finish setting, then move them to a rack. Cool the pans between batches so the dough does not start melting before it hits the oven.
Notes
Salt brand matters. The 1 3/4 teaspoons is Diamond Crystal kosher salt. Morton is about twice as salty by volume, so use 1 teaspoon of that instead.
Fold the mix-ins by hand. A stand mixer turns the pretzels to powder in about four seconds.
Keep the toffee inside the dough ball. Any shard touching the parchment melts and runs out into a lace edge.
Make-ahead: the dough keeps 3 days covered in the refrigerator, and scooped balls freeze for 6 weeks. Bake from frozen at 350F with 3 extra minutes.
Storage: airtight at room temperature, best for 3 days. Do not refrigerate. Baked cookies freeze for 3 months.
The pretzels soften from about day two. The peanuts are what keeps the crunch going.
Nutrition values are an estimate.
Adapted from a Martha Stewart drop cookie.
Nutrition
Serving: 1cookie | Calories: 148kcal | Carbohydrates: 18g | Protein: 2g | Fat: 8g | Saturated Fat: 4g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 3g | Cholesterol: 22mg | Sodium: 152mg | Potassium: 45mg | Fiber: 1g | Sugar: 11g | Vitamin A: 210IU | Calcium: 16mg | Iron: 1mg