Simple Walnut Cookies with Chocolate-Caramel Baking Truffles
Bake super tasty walnut cookies – a delicious shortcrust pastry, a simple cookie recipe even for Beginners!
Baking cookies couldn’t be quicker or easier: My recipe for delicious walnut cookies works with a little trick and without cutting out. The cookie dough is simply rolled in little balls, placed in your hand and pressed with 3 fingers to make grooves. Awesome right? That works really well. Of course, the cookies taste really delicious and look really good, and if you like, confectioner sugar sprinkled on top!
Walnuts, Almonds or Hazelnuts
Most Christmas cookies contain mainly Almonds and ground Hazelnuts. With my delicious cookies on the other hand, the Walnut has finally made its grand entrance! And here it is really exaggeratedly delicious: There are walnut grounds in the dough, the fancy chocolate baking truffles or morsels mixed in, and more walnut ground sprinkled on top.
You’d bake these walnut cookies quickly and easily with my delicious recipe. In addition to the great nutty taste and chocolate truffles mixed in, what I like best, the preparation is incredibly fast! The dough is made quickly, but you should plan a little time for cooling.
Crushing the Walnuts:
If you don’t have a Ninja Mixer like I do, you can also put the walnuts in a freezer bag, place it on a wooden board and pound it with a meat mallet until you have small pieces. That’s how my mother used to do it!
One of my favorite gadget in house is the Ninja Kitchen System (on Amazon) which I almost use daily. It also has a crush and dough function
What are Chocolate Truffles? The Toll House Chocolate Caramel Truffles can be bought here on Amazon
The Ingredients:
1.Walnuts: You need a lot of walnuts for my recipe. I crush my walnuts myself in my Ninja Mixer. I chop a part for 2 cups walnuts mainly for the dough very finely, 1/2 cup walnuts will be set aside and later cookies will be covered with it.
2. Butter: A good portion of butter makes the dough nice and soft and the walnut cookies are really tasty later 3. Powdered sugar: The dough becomes particularly smooth and the end result wonderfully tender if you add the confectioner sugar. You can also use need powdered sugar for sprinkling or icing.
4. One Egg. I like the ones from the free range hens.
5. Butter, unsalted
6. Flour: I mostly use Pillsbury or King Arthur regular white flour.
7. Baking Truffles: I used the Nestle Toll House bite-size filled Baking Truffles, Chocolate-Caramel-Dulce de Leche.
8. Rum extract, but Vanilla sugar extract will give it a good taste.
9. One teaspoon of sea salt
Walnut cookies ingredients, egg, butter, rum extract, sea salt, walnuts chocolate morsels and flour 
Ground 2 cups Walnuts in the mixer 
Soften 1 cup or 2 sticks of butter in the microwave for 20 sec. 
Add the soft butter to a medium bowl 
Mix butter, egg confectioner sugar and rum extract and sea salt in a medium bowl 
Mix butter, egg confectioner sugar and rum in a medium bowl until creamy about 2 min. 
Place mixture into your processor, add the flour and ground walnuts slowly and knead dough until smooth 
Add the chocolate baking truffles or morsels 
Remove dough from Kitchenaid or processor and stir the chocolate morsels into the dough 
Cool the dough for 15 min in the fridge, then roll out 
Cut out and roll balls from dough 
Make grooves with your fingers into dough 
Make grooves with your fingers into dough and place on cookie sheet layed out with parchment paper 
Bake cookies for 350 F (or at 325 F convection) for for ~15 min 
Remove cookies from oven, let cool. Sprinkle with confectioners sugar if you like 
Walnut cookies with chocolate truffles (morsels)
Prepare the dough now, bake later!
I often have a lot of fun cutting out cookies and then decorating them to my liking. But sometimes I feel like a fixed recipe because I don’t have much time. My walnut cookies are perfect for that. And the best part is, if my schedule gets thrown and I don’t get that far, I just leave the dough in the freezer until I have time to make cookies.
Tip: I find that super practical: If you want, you can prepare your dough for the walnut cookies a few days or even a few weeks in advance! To do this, form the cookie dough into rolls, wrap them in cling film and then freeze them. When ready to cook, let it thaw a bit and cut off slices.
I particularly like doing this with my favorite cookies, so I hardly have any work to do during the Advent season and I always have a load of them ready to bake. So it is of course particularly uncomplicated for me and makes baking a lot easier for me. And if you have children it makes a lot of more sense.
I rolled out my cooled dough about 3/4 inch thick, which is a good size. If you cut them thicker, the baking time will increase a little.
There is a great tip for cutting cookie dough nicely: Make rolls and wrap in cling film and then put them in the refrigerator or freezer. At that time you can do something else, such as cleaning up the kitchen or simply preparing and baking other delicious cookies. Before baking, cut the walnut cookies from a roll about 2 inch thick, proceed.
In my recipe, I didn’t use an icing. But that can be mixed very easy with confectioner sugar, water, rum or vanilla extract. You could just use a sieve and sprinkle with confectioner sugar on top while still warm.
Other variations:
Walnut cookies with Chocolate-Caramel morsels
Ingredients
- 2 cups ground Walnuts
- 1 cup butter (2 sticks, room temperature)
- 3/4 cup confectioner sugar
- 2 tsp Rum extract
- 1 tsp sea salt
- 1 egg
- 2 1/2 cup flour
- 1 (226 g) Toll House Baking Truffles (Chocolate Caramel)
Instructions
- Grind 2 cups of the Walnuts in food processor.
- Put 1/2 cup ground walnuts aside.
- Cut soft butter in pieces.
- Add the butter, powdered sugar, egg, salt and Rum extract into a medium bowl.
- Mix until creamy about 2 minutes.
- Place everything in the Kitchenaid or Ninja Mixer with knead function.
- Add the flour, one cup each and knead until dough is smooth.
- Add 1 1/2 cup ground walnuts to the dough, knead.
- Add more flour if necessary, knead.
- Transfer dough back to the bowl.
- Now drop in chocolate morsels and lift it into the dough with a spatula.
- Place a bowl with the dough into the refrigerator for about 15 min.
- Alternately you can make rolls and place in cling wrap (2 inch thick), then freeze or refrigerate for an hour.
- Remove dough from the refrigerator.
- Preheat oven to 350 F or 325 F Confect oven.
- Place the dough on a silicon baking mat and roll about 3/4 inch thick (or cut slices if you have a roll)
- Cut out and form little balls.
- Press down the balls with 3 fingers in your hand.
- Drop the 1/2 cup ground walnuts we put aside into the groove of all cookies.
- Place cookies on baking sheet layed out with parchment paper.
- Bake at 350 F for about 15 min. until cookies turn golden.
- Remove from oven and place on a baking rack.
- Optional: You can now sprinkle the cookies with confectioner sugar if you like.
Notes
You could decorate the cookies with a whole walnut, or place into a groove some jam before baking.
Optional: Top with confectioner sugar
