Black sesame white chocolate cookies; an unusual but irresistible sweet and salty cookie scented with toasted sesame seeds and studded with creamy white chocolate chunks.
While I always strive to provide recipes that don’t utilise too many faffy methods or hard-to-find ingredients, sometimes I just come across something I have to share. Even if the colours of the finished product admittedly aren’t the usual palette you’d expect from a cookie.
In the case of this recipe, it’s thanks to gomasio. A stunningly savoury and flavourful seasoning powder of Japanese origin, made from toasted sesame seeds and salt.
I’m by no means the first white girl to have shared a recipe using this wonderful and humble little ingredient, but I’m very pleased to be providing as such in the form of a cookie. A black sesame white chocolate cookie. A soft, chewy, salty, sweet, creamy, lovely cookie.
Gomasio is most easily found online or in specialty boutique-y type food shops. In the black sesame white chocolate cookies you see before you here today, I used the black kind (made from black sesame seeds), but the regular kind will provide just as fine a flavour.
It’s great in salads, on rice, on roasted vegetables, and much more. However, in these little cookies it adds a stunning touch of savouriness and rounded flavour that plain old salt just wouldn’t be able to impart. Somehow it ticks the boxes of rich and subtle at the same time. You’ll detect sesame in the toasty flavour, but you won’t feel like you’ve ingested a gobful of tahini either.
These black sesame white chocolate cookies take a pinch of inspiration from the miso white chocolate cookies seen in Ed Kimber’s wonderful Chocolate Baking book I recently got my hands on. They also take inspiration (obviously) from my Classic Chocolate Chunk Cookies recipe, adding extra vanilla and sesame and swapping in creamy vanilla-spiked white chocolate. Of course, keeping milk or dark chocolate in its place certainly wouldn’t create an unpleasant outcome. That said, something about that contrast of white on black, and that unmistakably creaminess of white chocolate makes it a superior choice in my opinion.
As with all my cookie recipes, this one is easy-peasy to put together. I do always encourage chilling the cookie dough before baking, so while you’ll have very little hands-on and even less baking time, a bit of time accounted for in the middle is a good idea.
Enjoying these cookies warm as they cool down after baking is obviously recommended, however I’ve also been really enjoying them cold from the fridge this week. The chewy texture is really accentuated, and the chocolate still melts nicely in each mouthful. I hope you’ll love them as much as we have!
To make these black sesame white chocolate cookies, simply follow the recipe below.
Black Sesame White Chocolate Cookies
Ingredients
- 150g (10 tbsp) soft butter
- 100g (½ cup) caster sugar
- 100g (½ cup) soft light brown sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla bean paste or the seeds of 1 vanilla pod
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg yolk
- 300g (2 ½ cups) plain or ‘00’ flour
- 35g (3 tbsp) black gomasio (or toasted black sesame seeds and an extra pinch of salt)
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- ¼ tsp salt
- 225g (8 oz) white chocolate, chopped into chunks
- Makes 20-24 cookies
Instructions
- Line 2-3 baking trays with greaseproof paper.
- In a large bowl, beat together the butter, sugars, and vanilla until combined into a wet-sand-like mixture.
- Add the egg and egg yolk, one at a time, beating thoroughly between until well incorporated.
- Tip the flour, gomasio (or sesame seeds), bicarbonate of soda, and salt in and stir until you have a smooth dough.
- Mix in the chocolate chunks until you have a stiff cookie dough.
- Place the bowl of cookie dough into the fridge to rest and chill for at least 30 minutes. Leaving it overnight or for a full 24 hours will produce the best results, but even a few hours will allow the best texture and flavour to develop.
- About 20 minutes before you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven – 190°C / 170°C fan / 375°F / gas mark 5.
- Once chilled, roll small chunks of the dough and space them out generously on your prepared trays. You should get 20-24 balls of dough from the mixture. (Feel free to add an extra chunk of chocolate on top to make them extra appealing once baked!)
- Bake the dough balls in batches on their trays for 11-15 minutes until they have grown and are looking dry on top. We don’t want them to brown too much, but feel free to bake them for more or less time depending on your preferred consistency. Obviously, the larger your cookie dough balls are, the longer they may take to bake.
- Remove from the oven, and allow the cookies to cool on their trays for at least 10 minutes before cooling completely on wire racks.
- Enjoy!
BE A MAVERICK: if you like your flavours a bit more intense, you can swap the white chocolate for a nice 70% dark chocolate instead.
These black sesame white chocolate cookies will keep well in an airtight container for up to 5 days, but are best enjoyed fresh!
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