Brown Butter Nuggets
You're not browning your butter enough. No wait, that's too much.
My mother went to Harvard, but despite this, or maybe because of this, we were poor-ish when I was a kid. Christmas gifts to family consisted of homemade (and what I still consider to be superior) presents. Come the beginning of December, Mom would dust off her green plastic recipe file, riffle through the ‘from the kitchen of_________’ index cards contained within, and pull out a particular greasy, dog-eared card, propping it up on the storm window above the kitchen counter.
Thus began the process of making Brown Butter Nuggets, possibly the finest Christmas cookie to ever grace a holiday tin. The tin would also eventually contain little carrot cakes baked in mini bundt tins, little loaves of gingerbread, and other kinds of biscuit (maybe a stained glass cookie, maybe a Danish butter spritz, maybe a Brazil nut shortbread). But the Brown Butter Nuggets were, and remain, the standout. It goes without saying that the most favoured family member would receive the biggest, most beautiful tin, which they’d return during the year to be refilled the following Christmas.
The Nugget has a rustic, lumpen shape, a crumbly but firm texture, the indescribably seductive flavour and aroma of browned butter, and the surprise of a perfectly roasted nut inside.
The nut, which should never be replaced by another, is what I grew up calling a ‘filbert’ and is now commonly referred to as a ‘hazelnut’… or you might call it a ‘cobnut’ (but please don’t).
I won’t get into the finer details regarding filbert vs hazelnut vs cobnut, but suffice it to say, they’re more or less the same, or depending on who you’re talking to, exactly the same. So, cobnuts and filberts are both hazelnuts, but a cobnut may or may not be a filbert. Hope that clears it up.
To this day when I buy a bag of already-shelled, already-skinned nuts I think “omg the decadence”, and get a shiver of scanty, Yankee, East coast guilt. Back then, we shelled the nuts with a couple of nutcrackers, roasted them, and then rubbed them in a tea towel until the skins came off (only half of the nuts shed their skins easily, the other half we painstakingly rubbed individually, sometimes scraping the skin off each with a paring knife).
Browning the butter was the next arduous task, which required a fierce but patient eye. The idea is, don’t burn it (butter…. RUINED!), but you need to take it (on very low heat!) to the point right before the butter solids do burn, or else it's a waste of time. This cookie is ALL about the browned butter taste. I’ve prepared a handy photo montage below, taken when I multiplied the recipe by 6, so more butter to brown = much more time. 3 lbs of butter takes about 1.5 hours on low heat, but ½ lb (that’s what the recipe calls for) takes about 25-30 minutes. I am ashamed to divulge the number of times I’ve burnt the butter in my quest for the brownest, most flavourful result.
These cookies were already wonderful using the vastly inferior American butter, so I hardly need to tell you how AMAZING they are using Irish butter.
Rolling the cookies into truffle-like, crumbly balls is another labour of love, and the dough sometimes resists clinging to the nut, but please do make these! I fear that I’m putting you off with all my talk of scraping nuts, burning butter and hours of corralling recalcitrant dough, but trust me, they’re so worth it.
The other thing to note is that they are the kind of cookie that improves with age, so if you taste them right after they’ve cooled, you’ll be like “eww, why did I bother”— but if you’re patient, the next day they will have cured into an irresistible ball of festive deliciousness. The upside to this is that you can make them well before Christmas, and still give them as presents as long as they’re kept in an airtight container.
You can fill a repurposed litre jar with the nuggets, whack a ribbon around the top and give that as a Christmas gift, and not worry about having to get your fancy tin back. I’m making a bunch of these buttery balls at the moment, so if you’re around, expect a box of them.
Brown Butter Nuggets
Makes 48 cookies
48 hazelnuts, shelled, roasted and skinned
230g salted butter
140g caster sugar (granulated is fine)
seeds of 3 scraped vanilla pods, or 2 tsp great quality vanilla extract
360g strong white flour, sifted
1 level tsp baking powder
¾ tsp sea salt
Icing sugar for dusting
Preheat oven to 170C.
Start by browning the butter in a small saucepan. Melt the butter over medium heat, then once it’s melted, turn heat down to the lowest heat, and leave, stirring occasionally for about 25-30 minutes, scraping the browning butter solids up from the bottom of the pan. When the butter is quite brown and nutty smelling, pour into a big mixing bowl, scraping everything out of the pan with a rubber spatula. Don’t waste even a little bit of that browned butter!
Stir the sugar and the vanilla into the melted butter, until well combined, and allow to cool to room temperature.
Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt together in a separate bowl, then dump the dry ingredients into the melted butter and sugar, stirring well with your hands. The mixture should be buttery, crumbly and fragrant.
Wrap a small handful of the nugget mix around one hazelnut, referring to the photo above for size guide. Line the rolled nuggets up on a parchment lined baking sheet, spaced about 1cm apart- they rise a little, but not much.
When the tray is full, bake in your preheated oven for 20-25 minutes. They’ll turn a golden colour, and might crack a bit. Allow to cool on a rack, then dust liberally with icing sugar. Store in layers of parchment in an airtight container. Better after a couple of days, good for a few weeks.
There is the option to dip half of the nuggets in melted dark chocolate, but I prefer the straight up sugar dusted ones. The chocolate competes with the taste of the browned butter. I mention it only because some chocoholics like them better like that.
Merry Christmas.