Browned butter. Smoked almonds. Dark chocolate.
Oatmeal. Maple syrup. Salt and pepper.
I tend towards supersweet, kid-friendly cookies,
but these are not.
Nutty, smoky, salty — these are cookies for srs adults.

{ Improvised, with guidance from Simply Recipes, Sally’s Baking Addiction
and this life-saving tutorial on not burning the browned butter}

Gather:
1 cup (2 sticks/228 grams) butter

200g plain flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp cracked black pepper

3 cups oats
1 cup smoked salted almonds (roughly chopped)
1 cup dark chocolate chips¹

3/4 cup light brown sugar
1/2 cup white/caster sugar

2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp maple syrup

Sea salt, for sprinkling

Then:

1. Brown the butter! Melt it in a medium-sized saucepan over a medium–high heat.²
2. Stirring constantly, allow the butter to boil — it will froth up a lot, then the froth will subside completely, then it will froth up again as it starts to brown. When you start to see little brown granules and the liquid is a faint golden colour pull it off the heat immediately — it will continue to cook after you remove it from direct heat. This is a really great step-by-step visual guide if you need it. (I did!)
3. Carefully transfer the browned butter, bits and all, into a heatproof bowl, and pop it in the fridge to cool down while you do the rest of the prep.
   …
4. Put the flour, baking soda and pepper in a medium-sized bowl, and mix it gently with a fork to distribute the soda/pepper evenly. Set aside.
5. Roughly chop the almonds — I cut each one in half — and pop them in a large bowl with the oats and choc chips. Set aside.
   …
6. Take the browed butter out of the fridge, and put it, together with the brown and white sugars, in the bowl of your stand mixer.
7. Mix on a low speed for about 5 minutes — until the sugar has dissolved and the liquid is a little bit paler. (It won’t get thick and fluffy like the creaming stage of regular butter + sugar.)
8. Still mixing, add in the eggs one by one until fully incorporated.
9. Still mixing, add in the vanilla and maple syrup.
10. STILL mixing, slowly add in all the flour mixture until it’s completely incorporated. You can stop mixing now!
    
11. Add the oats/nuts/chocolate, and mix with a wooden spoon until the bits are evenly distributed. Pop the whole lot in the fridge to set for a while you preheat the oven.
12. Preheat the oven to 375ºF/190ºC.
13. When the oven’s ready (about 20 minutes later), roll tablespoonfuls of the cookie dough into firm balls, and set them out on parchment paper on a baking sheet — not too close together.
    
14. Bake until they’ve spread out into cookie shape, pull the tray out of the oven and sprinkle each cookie with a little salt…
    
    …then pop the tray back in the oven (the other way around if your heat is a bit uneven) until there just golden brown and starting to crisp around the edges.
15. Repeat until all the dough is baked — I made smaller cookies and got about 3 dozen cookies in the end.
16. Serve on a snacks table or picnic blanket, with some salty/sweet firm cheese (really), some crisp/fresh fruit (cherries or grapes maybe), and a cold glass of something grown-up (beer, white wine, it’s up to you — you’re the adult here).
    

Notes:
¹I think Guittard chocolate chips are the secret to Levain-level never-set gooey chocolate chips, but you can definitely use just any 60%+ dark chocolate here.
²Do not — I repeat do NOT — use a too-small saucepan. The butter will froth up to about 4x its original size — twice — and you don’t want hot butter all over the stove!