Strawberry & Cream Cookies - Sally's Baking Addiction

Soft-baked with crisp edges, loaded with chewy dried strawberries and creamy white chocolate, these strawberries & cream cookies deliver a summery-sweet taste any time of year.

Have you ever tried my strawberry biscuit cookies? Buttery, tender, and flaky, the cookies come together like an actual biscuit dough filled with fresh berries. They’re adorable, sweet, and topped with icing.

But they don’t have that chewy-dense texture we all know and love about, say, chocolate chip cookies. That’s because throwing fresh strawberries into cookie dough creates an overly wet cookie dough… aka a cookie paste. I love the strawberry biscuit cookies, but I never really gave up on my strawberry cookie quest.

Enter freeze-dried strawberries, the magical form of berry goodness that makes strawberry buttercream possible. Give the freeze-dried fruit a rough chop and throw them into cookie dough along with white chocolate chunks and cream cheese. This is a recipe for dessert utopia.

Why You’ll Adore These Strawberries & Cream Cookies

• Cream cheese in the dough makes for soft and creamy-tasting cookies
• The freeze-dried strawberries rehydrate in the dough, so the bits of berry are deliciously chewy (not airy and light)
• Perfectly sweet with gooey pools of melted white chocolate
• Thick and soft-baked center, with crispy edges
• Combination of white chocolate and strawberry is so yummy—just like in these white chocolate strawberry cupcakes
• Enjoy sweet strawberries & cream any time of year!

We’ll use the same cookie dough base as these cookies & cream cookies. Using a combination of butter and cream cheese, the cookies are extra soft and uniquely creamy-tasting. So satisfying.

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A Few Key Ingredients You Need

• Cornstarch: I love adding a touch of cornstarch because it helps create a thicker, softer cookie. If you don’t have it, just leave it out.
• Baking Soda: Helps the cookies puff up and then fall to their crinkly, chewy destiny.
• Cream Cheese: Makes for a deliciously soft and creamy cookie, which is what we all love in these cream cheese sugar cookies.
• White Chocolate: Chopped white chocolate melts into gooey little puddles of sweet creaminess. The pieces on the bottom of the cookies take on a delicious caramelized flavor, too. You can also use white chocolate chips instead, or semi-sweet, milk chocolate, or dark chocolate chips if you prefer.
• Freeze-Dried Strawberries: While these start with a light-as-air dry and crispy texture, the strawberries actually rehydrate in the dough, so they end up delightfully chewy in the baked cookies. (I don’t particularly love the texture of freeze-dried strawberries, but after baking in a wet dough, the texture totally transforms.)

Cream the Butter & Cream Cheese Together First

Creamed room-temperature butter and sugar is the base of many cookie recipes. But before we add the sugar, it’s imperative to properly cream the cream cheese and butter together. The two are different textures—cream cheese is much softer than butter. My tip is to beat the cream cheese in your mixer until very soft and smooth, with no lumps. Then add the softened butter and beat together until combined. This is your creamy base for these strawberries & cream cookies.

Freeze-Dried Strawberries Success Tips

1. Where to buy freeze-dried strawberries? I find freeze-dried strawberries in my regular grocery store in the dried fruit aisle. They’re becoming quite common. Trader Joe’s, Amazon, and Target all carry them, as well.
2. Mix them into the dough last. Beat in the white chocolate chunks first, and then add in the strawberry pieces on your mixer’s lowest speed, just briefly to incorporate, without letting the mixer crush the berries too much (or you’ll end up with pinkish taupe cookies). Use the pieces of strawberries, not all the strawberry dust that’s created when you chop the freeze-dried berries. Save that for making the frosting on a strawberry cake!

Expect a thick and sticky dough. Make sure you take the time to chill it in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, otherwise your cookies will spread into shapeless puddles in the oven. The dough stiffens up quite nicely after 2 hours in the refrigerator:

Tips for Shaping Your Cookies

After chilling, scoop the dough (heaping 1.5 Tablespoons/35g in size, I use this medium cookie scoop) and roll into balls. Actually, you want to form them into tall columns (LOL) to help ensure nice thick cookies, like you see me do when making chewy chocolate chip cookies.

These are thick, lumpy-bumpy cookies. Don’t expect them to come out looking uniform, thanks to the chunky pieces of chopped berries and white chocolate, but that’s part of their charm! Check on the cookies about halfway through baking and:

1. If they’re not spreading much, take the baking sheet out of the oven and bang it on your counter a couple times, to initiate the spread. The longer you chill the dough, the less the cookies will spread, so if you chill the dough for longer than 2 hours, let it sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes before forming into cookies and baking.
2. If your cookies are over-spreading or looking really uneven in shape or size, use a spoon to gently press in around the edges to reshape, then return the pans to the oven to finish baking.

I also like to press a few more white chocolate chunks into the tops of the strawberries & cream cookies when they’re still warm, but it’s only for looks. And if you have extra white chocolate, feel free to melt it and drizzle over the cooled cookies.

Let’s eat!

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