#5. White Chocolate and Cranberry Cookies, with and without Macadamia Nuts

I actually baked these cookies on January 16th! That's how far behind I am writing these up. Still, I think it's a good exercise, because I had gotten to the point where I was so tired of my ordinary diet that I didn't even want to shop for food.

This recipe is modified from one I copied out of The Dallas Morning News a few years ago: "Zodiac Room White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies." The Zodiac Room is a fancy restaurant at Neiman Marcus, the famous old Dallas department store. Here is a picture I found on Yelp:

I have never been to the Zodiac Room, nor anyplace remotely as fancy. I have browsed the racks at Neiman Marcus though, and I can see why one of our neighbors calls it "Needless Markups"... $98 for an ugly, see-through polyester shirt! And that was several years ago! A few months ago, I saw they had a whole room of enormous furs wired to alarmed racks. One cost over $8,000!!! (Shame on them for murdering furry little animals, by the way.)

Anyway, I had some raw macadamia nuts leftover from Christmas (I like to dip them in dark chocolate and set them out on a plate like candy), and I thought I could sneak them into this recipe because white chocolate macadamia nut cookies are a favorite of mine. I can't say these cookies were a total failure since they were gone in three days, but they turned out almost too hard to break in half and WAY too sweet, even though I put in 25% less sugar. The only way I could eat them was by dunking them in unsweetened coffee. You can easily google the recipe, so I won't include it here since I don't want anyone to skip my verbose ranting about how unsatisfactory the cookies were and just use the recipe.

Besides using less sugar, I left out the almonds (since I added macadamia nuts instead) and used 1/2 C. less flour because I had neglected to copy the quantity of flour onto my recipe card and just took a guess. They turned out prettily enough:

Here are the ones without macadamia nuts that I made for my roommate, who won't eat nuts. She tried one fresh off the cookie sheet, but then refused this pretty bowl I set aside for her. She didn't even say anything--just shook her head. When I asked her why, she said, "They're WAY TOO SWEET!" (She ended up sneaking two more later, though.)

It doesn't help that "Tollhouse Premiere White Morsels" are just corn syrup and lactose. I regret the waste of expensive raw macadamia nuts on these silly things. I should have just made myself a bowl of macadamia nuts and dried cranberries and saved myself some calories and effort.