Soft, chewy white chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookies. They’re not overly sweet and so wholesome.
Ingredients
- Flour – To get the best structure, I recommend using all-purpose flour. White whole wheat flour might also be a suitable replacement, but I do not recommend using cake flour or bread flour. These cookies do lend themselves to a 1:1 gluten-free baking mix.
- Oats – You should use old-fashioned oats only in this recipe. If you want, you can gently pulse the oats in a food processor once or twice to break them up slightly. Do not use instant or quick cooking oats.
- Leavening – This cookie uses a touch of both baking powder and baking soda to make them puffy and soft.
- Salt – I recommend using fine sea salt for the recipe. The salt help enhance all the flavors in the cookie and make them really come alive.
- Butter – Unsalted butter is a must. The recipe doesn’t work as well with butter substitutes like margarine. If you want to really take your cookies to the next level, add another ¼ cup and turn it into brown butter. Wait until the butter is cooled slightly and continue with the recipe.
- Eggs – Use a large egg at room temperature. I like to leave my egg in a bowl of warm water to speed up the process.
- Sugar – We use a mix of granulated sugar and a note of brown sugar for added depth. I like the mix, but if you do not have brown sugar, you can use more granulated sugar. If you don’t want to miss out on that depth, you can add in a teaspoon of molasses if you have any available.
- Mix-ins – To keep the list short, this includes our orange zest, cranberries, and vanilla. I recommend using your favorite type of orange – I like Cara Cara. Unsweetened dried cranberries are the best here, but if you can only find the sweetened version, that’s okay, too. You can reduce the granulated sugar by ¼ cup. As always, use pure vanilla extract.
- Chocolate – We obviously need white chocolate. I recommend using a white chocolate bar over chocolate chips. This is because white chocolate chips are very temperamental when melting.
Method
Putting together these white chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookies is incredibly simple. They take just a few moments until they’re ready for the oven!
- Start by measuring out all your ingredients. Trust me, it makes your life so much easier when you have everything already measured out and at the right temperatures ready to go.
- Mix together the dry ingredients except for the cranberries and set aside in a bowl.
- Beat together the butter and sugars, along with the orange zest and vanilla. This helps to infuse them with the flavors.
- Add in the egg and beat until everything gets light and fluffy.
- Pour in the dry ingredients and mix, then fold in the cranberries. Stir well so the cranberries are evenly spread throughout the dough.
- Chill your dough. It helps to infuse the flavors and gives us the perfect dough for baking with minimal spreading.
- Portion out the dough and bake!
- Once they’re cooled, drizzle them with melted chocolate.
Tips
Be careful measuring out the flour. I like to give my flour a quick fluff, then spoon the flour into a measuring cup. If you use too much flour, you will have trouble with the cookies not spreading properly during baking.
I can’t emphasize this enough, but bring all the ingredients to room temperature. if you forget to take out the butter ahead of time, you can use my tips to soften butter quickly (hint, cutting the butter into small portions helps it soften faster).
Allowing the dough to rest not only infuses the dough with flavor, but also helps soften the oats for a delicious chewy texture.
Use a cookie scoop to measure out the dough. That way, they are all the same size. No need to roll or shape the dough after scooping.
The cookies may still look a little puffed in the center when you first take them out the oven. They should deflate once they’ve had a chance to cool a bit.
Once you’ve drizzled the white chocolate on top of the cookies, a nice sprinkling of orange zest adds a bit more oomph to the flavor.
F.A.Q.s
This recipe is great with other dried fruits, too! Cherries, blueberries, and raisins are all great! Just bear in mind, they might not be as delicious with the orange zest, so you can omit it if you want.
It could be that you accidentally over measured the flour. Another reason could be that your fridge is super cold and the cookie dough didn’t get a chance to spread out much in the oven. Try leaving the unbaked cookies at room temperature for about 5 – 10 minutes once you’ve portioned them out.
Related recipes
If you’re a fan of these white chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookies, try out my malted chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, s’mores cookies, blueberry oatmeal cookies, orange chocolate chip cookies, and chocolate peanut butter no-bake cookies.
