White Chocolate Cranberry Pistachio Cookies

These incredibly soft and buttery, salty and sweet white chocolate cranberry pistachio cookies will be your new favorite. There is so much texture in every bite of these holiday cookies!

These cookies are a texture lover’s paradise. Between the soft dough, crunchy pistachios, and chewy dried cranberries—I could eat these salty sweet cookies for the rest of my life and be content. Really. There is something different in each bite!

Truth is, I’ve been making these cookies for the past 2 years. I simply take my white chocolate cranberry cookies and add pistachios. The salty pistachios turn that incredible cookie into an extraordinary cookie. I had to share the recipe with you this year.

Irresistible cookie tower. ↓ ↓

Besides all the glorious chunks of add-ins, butter is the star of the show in this recipe. Which brings me to another edition of:

Food Science Alert 

Butter is where most cookie recipes begin and it has several jobs in both the mixing bowl and the oven. First, it keeps cookies tender. If you left butter out of a cookie recipe calling for it, you’d likely end up with a tough, dense, and flavorless cookie. Speaking of flavor, butter is where a ton of this cookie’s flavor comes from. Subbing butter with a less flavorful fat such as shortening or margarine will yield some pretty lousy, bland cookies. As cookies bake, the milk proteins inside the butter begin to brown—giving the cookies nutty, butterscotch-y notes of flavor. I love butterscotch-y.

The soft, airy centers come from—you guessed it—the butter! How butter is mixed into cookie dough affects a cookie’s texture. In my chewy chocolate chip cookies recipe, I use melted butter. Melted butter is what makes them so insanely dense and fudge-like, almost tasting (and looking!) like straight-up cookie dough. But with these cookies, I chose to cream the butter with the sugars. During this creaming process, air is incorporated into the mix which, in turn, helps leaven the cookies as they bake. The cookies rise up, the centers stay soft, and the edges slightly crisp. Cookie perfection.

In short, butter = everything.

In addition to butter, another powerhouse ingredient I use is cornstarch. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’re already familiar with my love of cornstarch in cookie favorites like chocolate chip cookies and shortbread cookies. You see, cornstarch makes the cookie dough thicker—yes, the cookie dough actually thickens as it chills.* Thicker, more sturdy cookie dough bakes into thicker, more compact cookies. Today’s cookies are anything but frail and dainty!

I’m beginning to bore myself. Are you still reading? I’m almost done, I promise.

*Chilling! One of the most important steps in this cookie recipe. Chilling allows the cookie dough to thicken and the flavors to enhance. That nutty, butterscotch-y-ness I mentioned above? It will blow your mind if you let this cookie dough chill. The minimum is 2 hours, but I always let it chill overnight. I know, it’s such a drag to wait that long for cookies. But the results are undeniably worth it.

Everything works so wonderfully together in these cookies. Tart cranberries paired with sweet white chocolate morsels. Salty pistachios paired with a brown sugar, buttery cookie dough. Delightfully crisp edges, soft centers, and chunks in every bite. There’s a reason I make these cookies so often—they’re simply the best.

You’re going to love them.

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