I Tried Reese Witherspoon’s Most Beloved Cookies
When you Google “cowboy cookies,” search results mainly pull Laura Bush’s recipe, made famous when it bested Tipper Gore’s gingersnap recipe in a Family Circle bakeoff during the 2000 presidential election.
However, Reese Witherspoon’s cowboy cookie recipe (actually, it’s her grandma’s) from her cookbook, Whiskey in a Teacup, is getting its time in the limelight, too, after Good Morning America featured it in its 25 Days of Cookies feature. But can it unseat the former First Lady’s version?
Get the recipe: Reese Witherspoon’s Cowboy Cookies
How to Make Cowboy Cookies
A cowboy cookie is a jacked-up oatmeal cookie. It’s stuffed — and I mean stuffed — with chocolate chips, pecans, and shredded coconut.
Begin by creaming softened butter, light brown sugar, granulated sugar, and vanilla until it’s nice and fluffy. Add eggs and carefully stir in flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
Former First Lady Laura Bush’s recipe included a tablespoon of ground cinnamon, a unique addition that’s also represented in Witherspoon’s recipe. In fact, the base recipe is identical to Bush’s recipe. The difference comes with the mix-ins — a reduced amount of chocolate chips, oats, coconut, and pecans, with Rice Krispies cereal filling the void.
To thoroughly mix the dough, you need a very large mixing bowl. Folding in the nine cups of mix-ins requires a strong arm and a long, stiff-handled spatula. The stand mixer won’t be able to handle this part of the recipe.
In the end, Witherspoon’s recipe produces more than five pounds of dough that supposedly makes three-dozen cookies — but, in reality, it makes at least a dozen more.
My Honest Review of Reese Witherspoon’s Cowboy Cookies
Eating cowboy cookies almost feels like work because of the chewing required to get through all the ingredients. But the heartiness is part of the appeal. These treats needed to sate and sustain hard-working cowboys, after all.
Witherspoon’s recipe is no different. Well, the Rice Krispies are a little different, but the added ingredient is imperceptible. If I didn’t tell you they were in there, you wouldn’t know. I’m not entirely sure what they add, so if you don’t want to buy a box only to have most of it go stale in your pantry, feel free to omit it or opt for cornflakes instead (technically then you may be veering into ranger cookie territory).
The cookies are quite sweet and filling. Unlike with chocolate chip cookies, I really can eat only one cowboy cookie in a sitting. Fortunately, the cookies also freeze well! (Freeze portioned dough balls on a tray, then transfer to a plastic bag for longer storage.) The cowboy cookies also taste better after a day or two at room temperature once the myriad ingredients have had time to get better acquainted.
Tips for Making Reese’s Cowboy Cookies
Use a really big bowl. If you use a regular KitchenAid stand mixer for the dough, you’ll need to transfer it to an even bigger bowl to add the mix-ins. If that’s not available, try splitting the dough into two bowls.
Try it with unsweetened coconut. While the recipe doesn’t specify to use sweetened or unsweetened coconut, I suggest the unsweetened variety because the dough is already sweet enough. Save the sweetened stuff for making macaroons.
Experiment with other mix-ins. According to Witherspoon, the recipe is very forgiving and easy to adjust. Try adding toffee chips, subbing walnuts for pecans, using cornflakes instead of Rice Krispies, or injecting Christmas cheer via M&Ms. Whatever you do, keep the total volume of mix-ins the same.
Don’t skip the chilling step. Trust me — the chill time is a necessity. Not only does it help the cookies not spread, but it also really helps the flavors meld.
Use a cookie scoop. The easiest way to portion the cookies is with a spring-loaded 1 1/2-tablespoon or 2-tablespoon scoop. If you want to make three-dozen Texas-sized cookies, use 1/4 cup of dough per cookie (you’ll be able to fit about four cookies on each tray) and bake for 17 to 20 minutes.
Underbake them slightly. Overbaking the cookies makes them lose the satisfying chewiness, so it’s best to err on the side of underbaking them. Pull the cookies out of the oven when they’ve just browned around the edges, but the centers still look a little wet and puffy. They’ll continue to set on the baking sheet as they cool.
Get the recipe: Reese Witherspoon’s Cowboy Cookies
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