Brown Butter Matcha Miso Cookies For The Holidays by Kat Lieu

Some things should never spread. Like the obnoxious legs of chronic manspreaders in NYC subways. Or viruses like effing corona. And while some bakers would argue cookies should spread less, we actually want these bigger-than-your-face cookies to spread gloriously. We want them to be big, huge, and impressive, so when you’re ready to give a gift to your languishing friend or emo neighbor, their dull eyes, zombified by our TikTok world, will light up with genuine joy this holiday season. We’ll put this matcha cookie dough through quite a lot. First, we melt and burn the butter until it’s toasty, nutty, and browned. Then we’ll chill the dough and think it won’t spread, but alas it still will because the fat has all been pre-melted before hitting the oven. You’d think these cookies will taste weird because of the miso, but then you realize holy eff, the subtle umami hits your tastebuds and caresses them, leaving a transient film of deliciousness. Be generous with your mix-ins. You’re welcome to use chocolate chips, but a good chocolate cookie must have chocolate chunks, and any chocolate lover would attest to that. Happy holidays and happy baking, fam! Hope you love this recipe! Make them now, before they go viral, so you’ll be that cool, hip baker who baked these before they’re trending. (I’m not sleeping much these days because I freaking wrote a cookbook and being an Asian female, y’all know how EXTRA hard we have to work to succeed and break ceilings, so excuse me if my headnote here sounds a little cray. Promise you my cookbook is tamer than this, but if this one’s a best-seller, I won’t censor myself when I write the next cookbook!)

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Brown Butter Matcha Miso Cookies for the Holidays

Yield

6 bigger-than-your-face-cookies

Author

Kat Lieu

Prep time

15 Min

Cook time

16 Min

Inactive time

30 Min

Total time

1 Hour

With the depth of flavor and nuttiness of brown butter, combined with earthy matcha, and a slight hint of miso, these huge and crave-worthy cookies will surely impress all your friends and fam this holiday season! Add any mix-ins of choice. I chopped up a whole bar of semi-sweet chocolate, added a handful of chocolate chips, and some marshmallows. Feel free to add cranberries for a pop of color. You can't go wrong with just chunks of chocolate though, but hey, it's the holidays, be creative and have fun!

Ingredients US Metric

• 3/4 cup unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar, unpacked
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs (about 100 g)
• 1 tablespoon miso (white or red)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, optional
• 1 1/2 cup cake flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1 tablespoon matcha

Mix-ins of choice

• 1 bar of semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
• 1/4 to 1/3 cup chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup mini marshmallows
• or 1/3 cup cranberries with 1/3 cup pistachios or other nuts of choice
• You could also cut up a bar of white chocolate and add that in the dough

Instructions

1. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
2. Make brown butter by heating the butter in a saucepan over medium heat for a few minutes, occasionally stirring, until toasty brown bits form on the bottom. The liquid butter is ready when it is golden-brown (more brown than gold, really). Remove from heat and transfer to a large mixing bowl (or the bowl of a stand mixer that's fitted with a paddle attachment).
3. Allow the butter to cool enough so that the bowl isn't too hot to touch. You don't want to cook the eggs. Mix in the sugars and combine until it looks like oily wet sand. Mix in the eggs, one by one, before adding the vanilla extract and miso. Sift in the dry ingredients (flour, matcha, baking powder, cornstarch) and mix until combined. Don't over mix. At this point, if the mixture is too runny, add in scant amounts of cake flour to thicken the dough.
4. See this video https://www.instagram.com/p/CV1U-PMDkgz/ as a reference.
5. Fold in your mix-ins of choice. I used a medium cookie scoop to spoon large balls of dough onto the parchment paper. Give each cookie ample space to account for spread. Since this is a buttery cookie, it will and should spread. (We also already liquefied the butter, so the dough is a wetter dough, and the fat has already melted even before baking.) On a large baking sheet, you'll have room for about 4 cookies nicely spaced apart.
6. Repeat until you have about 6 large cookie balls. Don't flatten them. Freeze, uncovered for about 30 minutes. (Cookies brown better and have a richer chewier texture as the refrigeration allows the flour in the dough to hydrate.)
7. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C) with a rack in the center. If your oven runs hot, preheat to about 350°F (180C). (We do want these cookies to spread as we want them to be big. Lower baking temperatures tend to lead to more spreading when baking cookies.) Bake for about 16 minutes, until the edges begin to brown and the center is not runny. I like to put on an oven mitt and bang the baking sheets against the oven racks, about 10 minutes into baking, to help the cookies spread even more. Allow the cookies to set and cool directly on the baking sheets after you remove them from the oven.
8. Enjoy these warm, with a nice cup of milk of choice, or wrap them up and pass out as gifts. See if you can make these cookies bigger than your faces! Tag me #subtleasianbakes

Recommended Products:

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Recipe COPYRIGHT © PHILANDMAMA.COM and modernasianbaking.com 2021, Phil and Mama, LLC. All rights reserved. You may not use any photographs of Phil and Mama Kat without both verbal and written consent from the owners of www.philandmama.com.

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About the Baker

Kat Lieu is the founder of Subtle Asian Baking and this website modernasianbaking.com, and she is the author of Modern Asian Baking at Home. Currently, Kat is a full-time author and recipe developer. Follow her on instagram and check out her blog Phil and Mama.

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