Harry Potter’s Butterbeer Cookies (aka Butterscotch Cookies)

Name: Harry Potter's Butterbeer Cookies (aka Butterscotch Cookies)
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 25 min
Yield: 12
Ingredients: 1⅓ cup all purpose flour; ½ teaspoon baking soda; ½ teaspoon baking powder; ¾ teaspoon kosher salt; ⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon; ½ cup salted butter, semi-melted; ⅓ cup light brown sugar, packed; ¼ cup granulated sugar; 1 teaspoon butter extract (optional); 2 teaspoons vanilla extract; 1 large egg + 1 egg yolk; ½ cup butterscotch chips; ⅓ cup chopped pecans (or white chocolate chips); Flakey sea salt for topping

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Harry Potter’s Butterbeer Cookies are a fun treat to make for Halloween! These cookies are loaded with butterscotch chips and have the most delicious buttery flavor! Perfect to make when you’re having an HP movie night or throwing a Harry Potter party!

butterbeer cookies on faux spider web with plastic spiders

Magical!

These cookies are the most delicious combination of butterscotch and nostalgia!

It should come as no surprise that I’m one big Potterhead. I mean, I did do a whole post on the best tips for Visiting the Wizarding World of Harry Potter as a grown adult. I ate pumpkin pasties, drank my weight in pumpkin juice, and ate buckets of fish and chips at Three Broomsticks, but nothing gets me like a butterbeer-flavored treat! Be it a warm butterbeer or an ice cream from Florean Fortescue’s.

These butter beer-inspired cookies are one of the best cookies to come out of my kitchen. They require no refrigeration; you just mix them in a bowl, and then pop them in the oven to bake. And what you’re left with is dollops of delicious cookie dough speckled with butterscotch flavor.

And hey, I get it if you aren’t a butterscotch chip fan, swap them for white chocolate chips, and I promise you, the flavors will be just as delicious!

Fellow Harry Potter fans, this one’s for you!

Ingredients for Harry Potter’s Butterbeer Cookies:

All-purpose flour: The flour is the base of the recipe.
Leavening agents: You’ll need both baking powder and baking soda for this recipe. We’ll add these dry ingredients to the flour before adding them to the wet ingredients.
Kosher salt + flakey sea salt: You’ll need kosher salt for the batter and some flakey sea salt (such as this one) to sprinkle on top once the cookies are done baking. The butterscotch flavor becomes more pronounced with the salt, so don’t be afraid to use it in this recipe.
Ground Cinnamon: helps flavor the cookies without being too overpowering. You won’t even know it’s there, but it helps bring out some warmth in the cookies.
Salted butter: typically, salted butter is my favorite ingredient to use in baked goods. I use this for my favorite chocolate chip cookies and recommend it for many other baked goods as well. If you only have unsalted butter on hand, you can use it for this recipe, but I do suggest upping the amount of kosher salt to 1 teaspoon.
Light brown sugar + Granulated sugar: We’ll use both of these sugars and mix them with the softened butter. The sugars provide moisture in baked goods so that cookies, cakes, muffins, and brownies don’t dry out too quickly.
Butter extract + vanilla extract: The butter extract is optional, but I find that it really amps up the flavor of these butterscotch cookies. To be entirely honest, I’m not a huge butterscotch pudding mix or butterscotch chip fan, so for me, the cookies provide plenty of that butterscotch cookie flavor without needing the chips!
Eggs:
Butterscotch chips: You know how I mentioned there are people who don’t like butterscotch chips? I would be one of those people! You could even use white chocolate chips or omit the chips entirely and add a bit more pecans! We had a divided household on this one! Hubby loved the chips, while I wasn’t a huge fan!
Chopped Pecans: These add the best nutty flavor! If you’re dealing with allergies, feel free to swap the pecans for white chocolate chips. They do make the cookies a bit sweeter but also provide a more Harry Potter butterbeer cookie flavor!

How to make Harry Potter’s Butterbeer Cookies:

Start the prep. Preheat the oven. and make sure to line a baking sheet with parchment paper. This ensures the cookies won’t stick to the pan. If you have a silicone baking mat, that works too.
Combine the dry ingredients. In a bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, kosher salt, and cinnamon. If you have larger clumps in your baking soda, I do suggest sifting it to ensure the batter mixes evenly.
Cream the wet ingredients. Add your semi-melted butter to a bowl. When I say semi-melted, I mean some of it should be liquid, while some of it is super soft and starting to melt. Add both the white sugar and the brown sugar and beat these ingredients together in a medium bowl with a hand mixer set to medium speed or in the bowl of a stand mixer until it starts to lighten in color. Then add the butter extract, 2 tsp vanilla, egg yolk, and the whole egg to the mixture.
Let’s make cookie dough. Mix again before you fold in the dry ingredients. I like to stop when the dry ingredients are halfway combined, then add the chips and the pecans and continue folding. This ensures you don’t overwork the cookie dough, and the little bit of flour helps disperse the add-ins better.
Scoop it out. Using a cookie scoop, make cookie dough balls that are about 2 tablespoons worth of cookie dough. You can speckle the center of the cookie with a few more butterscotch chips or pecans to make them more picture-perfect when they come out of the oven, but this is purely optional.
Bake the cookies. Bake the cookies until they are golden around the edges but still slightly underdone in the center. Don’t worry, the hot sheet pan will help bake the cookies all the way through. Remove from the oven and sprinkle with some flakey sea salt. Let them cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheet before transferring to a wire rack. These are the perfect butterbeer cookies! Each bite has some crunchy pecans and melted butterscotch chips! They just melt in your mouth!

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Yield: ~12-14 cookies