I usually try to publish at least one festive recipe per holiday, so today’s Red White and Blue Chocolate Chip Cookies are this year’s 4th of July contribution! Soft, chewy, and loaded with pretty patriotic sprinkles, this recipe is a cross between my Funfetti cookies and my favorite chocolate chip cookies (only no maple syrup involved this time). I went a bit light on the chips (both white chocolate and semisweet) so that the buttery taste of the cookie and the crunchy pop of the sprinkles are the highlighted taste/texture here, and let’s just talk about those sprinkles for a second.
A Few Words on Sprinkles
For these 4th of July cookies I went with a festive blend of red white and blue star-shaped sprinkles and nonpareils. You can get away with using pretty much whatever appropriately colored sprinkles your local grocery store or cake shop has on the shelf — I know my local store sells a patriotically-colored mix in the baking aisle. Personally I like to mix my own sprinkles and I bought mine online from Country Kitchen. I used a blend of these star sprinkles and nonpareils. I’m not recommending you go out and buy them for yourself just for one batch of cookies, whatever you can find at your grocery store will work just fine, but I get a lot of questions on where I buy my sprinkles so I thought I’d answer that here. And really, you don’t even have to use red white and blue sprinkles! Just use whatever colors you can find and call them “Firework Cookies” or something 😉! I know that I’m going to be making these cookies year ’round and substituting whatever color sprinkles are appropriate that time of year, and I have a feeling you’ll want to do the same once you try them.
Tips for Making These Cookies
Melt your butter, but then let it cool (a little bit).
Cut your butter into Tablespoon-sized pieces and melt it in about 15-second increments (stirring in-between) so that it doesn’t pop and splatter all over your microwave. It’s also important that the butter is not too hot when you add your sugars, or the sugars will actually melt and you’ll be left with a runny mess that won’t bake up nicely into cookies at all. If you’ve melted your butter slowly as suggested above, this won’t take very long, only about 5 minutes.
Use room temperature eggs
I recommend this with so many of my baked goods, but especially ones like this where we’re using melted butter. Using room temperature eggs will allow all of your ingredients to combine thoroughly while you are mixing, while cold eggs could begin to re-solidify your butter. If you don’t have room temperature eggs, just set your cold eggs in a bowl of lukewarm water for about 10-15 minutes to bring them to temperature.
Don’t leave out the cornstarch
I love using cornstarch in my cookies, it’s great for replacing some of the flour and giving the cookies some levity and structure while still keeping your baked good nice and soft. Since we are melting the butter, the cornstarch helps to bring back some of that lift that we are losing by not creaming our butter and sugar together.
Just chill
These cookies require at least 30 minutes of chilling before baking (again, we mostly have the melted butter to thank for that but I promise it’s worth it!). The dough should easily roll into a ball after chilling and if it doesn’t or is still too sticky it may require more time in the fridge. Keep your unbaked dough in the fridge to stay cool in between batches and never put cookie dough on a hot cookie sheet.
Enjoy! Looking for more festive 4th of July Desserts? Check out last year’s Star Spangled Cookies!
