White chocolate sugar cookies

Moist and chewy sugar cookies, with a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg and filled with white chocolate chips – yum!

Sugar cookies – that just sounds good, doesn’t it?  Did you know that there is a National Sugar Cookie Day every year?  On July 9 (just for your information!).  To celebrate this day, when I was on my quest of making all the foods for National Food Days a few years ago, I adapted a recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction and made these white chocolate sugar cookies. This was an awesome experiment that worked really well – so well that I’ve made them time and time again since then!

A few notes for the unwary:

• When I originally made these cookies, I hadn’t discovered my dairy intolerance and made them with butter.  They came out nice and fluffy, in little rounds of goodness.  Now, using dairy-free shortening, sometimes they kind of flatten out, with the white chocolate chips sticking up out of them.  Abby calls them little sombreros …!  
• If you want to make these grain-free as well – feel free to substitute the all-purpose gluten-free flour (usually containing rice flour) with 1 cup almond flour and 1/4 cup tapioca flour.  Actually, that may have had something to do with the flattened cookies as well – what do you think?
• Chilling the dough is VERY important!  Even with chilling the dough for over 24 hours, they still turned out flat with all my substitutions.  But even with the full gluten and dairy versions, make sure you chill the dough for at least 2 hours.  

So even though these may not look so light and fluffy every single time, irrespective of how they look, these white chocolate sugar cookies go so quickly when I make them at home – every single time – whether they are flat or not!  Of course, if you’re not partial to the white chocolate variety of cookies, feel free to check out some other chocolate chip cookie recipes, like here, here or here!

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White chocolate sugar cookies

(Gluten-free, dairy-free, can be grain-free)

Cook Time 8 minutes

Servings 16

Ingredients

• 1/2 C butter, softened to room temperature 115g, use dairy-free shortening if needed
• 3/4 C sugar 150g
• 1 egg room temperature
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 C 190g all-purpose gluten-free flour see below for grain-free options
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 C white chocolate chips dairy-free

Instructions

1. Cream the softened butter until smooth, then add sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Mix in the egg and the vanilla and set aside.
2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cream of tartar and spices.
3. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in 3 different parts. The dough is quite thick and you may have to stir the rest by hand.
4. Once combined, fold in the white chocolate chips.
5. Scoop large sections of dough and roll into balls. Make sure the balls are taller, rather than wide.

6. Chill the balls on a cookie sheet for at least 2 hours and up to 48 hours in the refrigerator.  This step is VERY important - do not skip it!

7. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350F and prepare baking pans.
8. Bake chilled cookie dough for 8 minutes. The cookies will appear undone and very soft. Allow the cookies to cool on the sheets for 3 minutes and more to wire rack to cool completely.

Recipe Notes

To make these grain-free, substitute the 1 1/2 cups gluten-free flour blend with 1 cup almond flour and 1/4 cup tapioca flour.