Pistachio Cookies | Ash Baber (2024)

I LOVE PISTACHIO SO MUCH but I haven’t made a lot of pistachio desserts. So I felt like I needed to.

But also I wanted to make something easy soooo pistachio cookies.

THESE COOKIES WERE SO GOOEY and the pistachio flavour was so good. If you like pistachio, you need to try this recipe immediately.

The main pistachio element in these cookies is the pistachio spread.

I wanted to find a way to add pistachio flavour to these without just relying on chopped pistachios inside of the cookie dough. Because this is good, but I feel like it doesn’t add a strong enough pistachio flavour.

Pistachio spread is VERY pistachio. And the smell is amazing too.

So I stuffed the cookies with this.

Any pistachio spread you can find will work. I used one from a brand called ‘Pisti’. I got it from Costco.

We’re just going to add dollops of this onto a tray, then leave these to freeze whiles we make the cookie dough.

These are the ingredients you will need to make the cookie dough:

• Unsalted butter – I like to be able to control the amount of salt when I bake, so I used unsalted butter and added the salt separately. But salted butter works too, just don’t add any extra salt.
• Sugar – We’re using both brown sugar and white sugar. The brown sugar is going to add moisture and a lot of flavour. The white sugar is going to add some crispiness.
• Vanilla
• Eggs – 1 whole egg plus an egg yolk. The extra egg yolk helps give your cookies soft gooey centres.
• Plain flour – also known as all purpose flour.
• Corn flour – also known as corn starch. This helps prevent the cookies from spreading as much, giving you thicker cookies.
• Baking powder
• Salt – to help enhance the flavours. Don’t add this if you are using salted butter.
• Chocolate – I added dark chocolate to my cookies, but you can use whatever kind you want.
• Pistachios – in the recipe card below, I’ve said to use 80g. But you can add less or more to your cookie dough if you wanted to.

In the recipe card I’ve said to used cold butter.

Cold butter, softened butter or melted butter can all be used for cookies.

However, I’ve learnt that using cold butter helps give you the thickest cookies.

I wanted thick cookies today, so I used cold butter.

All you need to do is take your butter out of the fridge, weigh the amount you need, then cut this into small cubes.

Now beat this with the sugar and vanilla, using a stand mixer or an electric hand mixer.

WITH THAT BEING SAID, if you are making these cookies by hand, don’t use cold butter.

It will be so difficult to beat the butter and sugar together, especially for 5 minutes.

So it’s better to just use softened butter if you are making this cookie dough by hand.

Your cookies might spread a little more than mine, but that’s ok they will still taste great.

Once the cookie dough has been made, we’re going to divide it into 6 pieces.

With each piece, flatten it out, add a piece of your frozen pistachio spread, then form this into a ball, making sure the cookie dough is fully covering the pistachio spread.

Once you have done this with all your dough, you want to leave these cookie dough balls in your freezer for at least an hour.

DON’T SKIP THIS.

Your cookies will spread too much in the oven if you don’t freeze the cookie dough. You will end up with flat cookies; we don’t want flat cookies.

So freeze them for an hour before baking!

The last thing I wanted to talk about was the baking temperature.

In the recipe card you will see that I baked the cookies at 220c/425f.

This might seem like a very hot oven for cookies…it is. Cookies are typically baked at 180c/350f.

But this is something I learnt that Levain Bakery in New York does.

Their cookies are known to be crispy on the outside, but gooey in the middle.

I heard that the way they achieve this is by baking the cookies are a higher temperature.

I don’t know if this is true I could have heard a lie, but I tried it one day.

It does make a big difference. Every time I bake my cookies at this temperature, I love the way they taste.

So we are baking these pistachio cookies at a high temperature too!

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