Gluten Free Soft Brown Butter, Brown Sugar Cookies with Almonds Recipe

Traditional sugar cookies get a sophisticated makeover with the complex flavors of brown butter and brown sugar, rounded with nutty ground almonds!

Makes up to a dozen

Soft Brown Butter, Brown Sugar Cookies with Almonds 

Brown butter or beurre noisette, as the French say, is the understated yet elegant ingredient that catapults these cookies from being your run-of-the-mill sugar cookies. The combination of ground almonds plays on the nuttyness of the brown butter and the brown sugar, soft and sweet, is the harmony to the butter and almond melody. And these cookies? These cookies will have you singin'.

I remember my first encounter with brown butter. I was following the guidance of a recipe for making fish caramelized in beurre noisette and as the butter turned from its comforting, vibrant yellow to a more sinister brown, I began to panic. I thought I had taken the butter too far and was preparing myself for a bitter acrid taste. Something compelled me to scoop the treacle-colored butter over the fish anyway, so I did. And then I tasted it and I was converted.

Brown butter symbolizes everything I love about cooking. It is butter's dark secret, revealed only when you take butter to its very limit. There's this sweetness, this nutty intensity. Some people have described as tasting and smelling of hazelnuts. It's such a comforting, complex flavor. In patisserie, it's used as the base of many pastry recipes and cookies and in savory cooking, it's used as a finishing sauce. In these cookies, it's the star of the show.

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Ingredients:

For the cookies
scant 1/4 tsp baking powder
scant 1/1 tsp bicarbonate of soda/baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup gluten free flour
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
4 tbsp ground almonds
120 g/8 tbsp butter

For the cookie garnish
2 tbsp packed brown sugar
2 tbsp sugar

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Instructions:

Soft Brown Butter, Brown Sugar Cookies with Almonds

1. Heat the butter in a stainless steel pan until melted. (You want to be able to see what's happening with that butter! Using a pan with dark non-stick coating makes this difficult.)
2. Cook the butter until it is golden brown and there are small flecks of dark brown solids in the pan.
3. When you start to see the flecks, immediately remove the pan from the heat and (carefully!) transfer the butter to a glass or ceramic bowl.
4. Allow the butter to cool completely, about 20 minutes. 
5. Meanwhile, preheat your oven to 180C/ 350F.
6. Combine the brown sugar and granulated sugar needed for the cookie garnish in a small bowl and set aside.
7. In another bowl, whisk flour, baking soda,baking powder, salt and ground almonds in a bowl.
8. Add a cup of brown sugar to the cooled brown butter and whisk to combine. Add the egg and vanilla to the brown sugar mixture and whisk until there are no lumps.
9. Tip the egg and butter mixture into the bowl with the flour and stir until it is just combined and incorporated.
10. Roll a tablespoon or so of dough in a ball. Plop each ball in the bowl prepared earlier with two sugars cookie garnish. Once thoroughly rolled in the sugar, place the balls on a cookie sheet. (I used a silicon mat.)
11. Bake 10 minutes, rotating the mat after 5 minutes. Your cookies will be a bit underdone after 10 minutes. This is what we want; they'll finish cooking as they rest!
12. Let cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes, then move them onto  wire rack to cool completely.

Note: these cookies keep well in an air-tight container. We managed to keep them for four days before they were all gobbled up. They were just as soft and indulgent on the fourth day as on the first. 

Gotta have cookies? Try these:

Ultimate Olive Oil Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Lavender & Almond Shortbread

Vanilla & Almond Biscotti