This is the year of birthday festivities and not just for myself. I recently spent a weekend celebrating a friend and was enlisted as part of her party favor crew. She wanted to share one of her favorite cookies with everyone –  The Pioneer Woman’s Malted Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies – so we rolled up our sleeves and got to baking.

Malted milk powder – the secret ingredient

On the surface this seems like a fairly standard cookie recipe and part of its beauty is its simplicity. The only difference, and it’s something new to me, was the addition of malted milk powder. Apparently this is something readily available in the grocery store – Nestle makes it under its Carnation brand. I’m familiar with Horlicks and Ovaltine powders and I wonder if they would work.

The malted milk powder adds an extra but subtle something that takes it beyond the standard chocolate chip cookie. Although these look like thin crispy cookies, they actually have a nice chew. I don’t know much about the science of baking but I wonder if these is also due to the addition of the malted milk powder.

Baking and storing

These cookies spread out quite a bit so unless you want one big cookie you won’t want to crowd them on the pan. Using a small cookie scoop (about 1 tablespoon) we could get 9 cookies on a standard sheet pan. We also found that they only needed about 8 minutes in the oven. This could vary depending on your oven so play around with it until you get your preferred level of doneness.

Because my friend loves these cookies so much we made an extra recipe and froze them as individual cookie dough balls so she can make them at any time.

Pretty packaging for a party

For the party we packaged the cookies in paper CD sleeves and tied them up with ribbon. They were a big hit – I think we may have had one package left by the end of the night.

Although this was the first time I made these cookies I think this is going to be one of my new go-to recipes.

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