Chocolate Macadamia Lace Cookies

This recipe reminds me of the cookies available at Whole Foods and Trader Joes.  They are really good store-bought cookies.  I tried to recreate them with this recipe I found online.  However, I did not have the exact ingredients...so what did I do?  What I always do (even if it makes the recipe not so good)...improvised!  I did not have vanilla paste, so I used extract, which probably led to the cookies being even more fragile than initially intended.  I don't know how I feel about these...maybe I used too much chocolate.  Eating these gives you an extreme sugar rush, where you feel out of it and jittery.  So maybe a word of advice, just follow the actual recipe, and maybe I'll try the same some day.  



Chocolate Macadamia Lace Cookies
based on recipe by Gourmet Betty


Ingredients
½ cup unsalted butter, cut into pieces
2 ounces semisweet chocolate, Ghirardelli or other fine quality chocolate, cut into pieces (I used chips, and I think I ended up using 1/2-3/4 cups of them).
1/2 cup macadamia nuts, chopped
1 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla paste (I substituted with vanilla extract)
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg, lightly beaten


Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.


2. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, melt the butter and chocolate, cook stirring with rubber spatula frequently for about 5 minutes.


3. Pour butter mixture into small bowl and let cool slightly.


4. In a large bowl, combine chopped nuts, sugar, egg, vanilla, and salt until blended. Fold in butter and combine until blended.


5. Drop the batter by tablespoons about 3" apart.


6. Bake 6 -8 minutes. You know they're done when the cookies are bubbling and completely flat.


7. Let cool until hard enough to transfer to container. Very fragile, not very good cookies for transporting.