Cream of tartar is a powdery acid that’s the byproduct of winemaking. It’s mostly used to stabilize egg whites and sometimes used as a leavener. You can find it in the baking aisle, near the baking powder and baking soda. Many people think it’s a pain to have around and are always looking for substitions or recipes without.

A great substitute for cream of tartar is fresh lemon juice. If you want a bit of acidity in your cookie but don’t have cream of tartar, try adding in 1.5 teaspoons of fresh lemon juice. Or, you can leave it out and have a soft and chewy cinnamon sugar cookie!Browned butter brings so much flavor to baked goods for just a tiny bit of extra effort. It’ll add a nutty caramel roundness and highlight the cinnamon and sugar making your snickerdoodles deeper, richer, and more intense. And bonus, you don’t have to wait for your butter to come to room temp!

If you want cookies that are plush and thick, not thin and spread out, make cookie ball snowmen. Instead of scooping out single balls of cookie dough, scoop out two balls and stack them. As they bake, the cookie dough balls will melt down but not spread out, baking into distinct edges and middles.

I have been on a quest for really, really good chocolate chip cookies. I tried all of the ones in NYC that everyone loves (post is written, coming up soon once the photos are done!) and I’ve been sampling the random chocolate chip cookies I’ve been seeing here and there in Tokyo, but there’s something about homemade that beats out store bought. Unless the store bought is amazingly good. Anyway, I made these brown butter macadamia nut dark chocolate chip cookies back while we were at home and they were everything I wanted in a macadamia nut chocolate chip cookie.

Usually macadamia nut chocolate chip cookies are white chocolate, which, while really tasty, tend to be a bit sweet for me. I‘m actually not quite sure why white chocolate seems to be the go-to pairing for macadamia nuts. Is it because they’re both white so you can get tricked into thinking you’re eating either a nut/chocolate but it ends up being the other? All I’m getting out of this is that white chocolate macadamia nut cookies are false representation and tricks!

What isn’t tricky is this cookie. It’s essentially my all time favorite brown butter chocolate chip cookie but with macadamia nuts in it. I went a little crazy though and didn’t chop the macadamia nuts which meant that the cookies ended up a lot lumpier than I wanted. When I make these again (and I will!) I will chop up the macadamias so the batter can relax a little more in the oven and the chocolate has room to spread and pool out. Even those these weren’t aesthetically how I wanted, they were darn delicious. I know we eat with our eyes first and considering the world we live in (everything needs to be instagrammable) a cookie that isn’t perfect looking can be a hard sell. But these guys are just going to humbly sit here and be themselves because they’re secure in the fact that they taste good :)

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