My housemate: Oh, what cookies are you making?

Me: Gochujang caramel cookies.

My housemate: I’m sorry, gochujang-what?

I came across NYT Cooking’s post on making gochujang caramel cookies last week and thought to myself, “Huh. Why not?” It seemed to have gotten pretty good reviews and it fit with the holiday season of cookie making. I was excited to make these despite receiving a lukewarm/uncertain response from my housemates. Using this recipe and this video as a reference, I got to work on making them.

The first part was making the gochujang swirl mixture, which was just three ingredients–butter, gochujang, and brown sugar. The recipe called for room temperature softened butter, which I did not prepare for. So my solution was to give the stick of butter to one of my housemates and have her hold it in her warm hands until it became softened. The strategy was almost too effective where the butter started to partially melt in her hands.

My housemate: Hey, this butter is starting to sweat in my hands.

Me: Oh shoot, too much.

Anyway, so I stirred up my mixture in a small bowl with a spoon and set it to the side.

Making the dough was pretty short work but I did tweak it a bit and made a few errors with the recipe. I was too lazy to mix it myself so I threw everything in a stand mixer. As everything was mixing together, I realized that perhaps the butter that I softened wasn’t as softened as I have hoped, as I noticed small flecks of butter appearing the dough. No matter, I pressed on and creamed the butter and sugar together as best as I can before adding the rest of the wet ingredients, followed by the dry ingredients. This step felt very similar to putting together my dough for sugar cookies. In essence, this was a sugar cookie.

I then popped it in the fridge and resumed making them the next day. My first mistake was forgetting that dough becomes hard when it’s in the fridge and I needed to give it time to soften to room temperature. Because I did not do that, when I proceeded to the next step of swirling the gochujang into the dough, the dough was not pliable enough to be stirred. I ended up putting in some elbow grease and sort-of swirling/digging in the gochujang into the now stiff sugar cookie dough. It definitely did not look as elegant as what appeared in the video.

Nevertheless, I pressed on and rolled about 12 balls worth of cookies and placed them on the baking sheet, baking them in two batches, 6 balls each. After around 10-12 minutes, each batch was finished and I waited for each batch to cool down for about five minutes.

These cookies ended up looking pretty cool, with the red highlights and streaks of gochujang in each cookie. I didn’t see the characteristic craters that were seen on the cookies in the video but it looked pretty cookie-ish to me. I can only assume that the difference in texture was due to some changed factors in dough-making. My hunch was that it had something to do with the small bits of butter seen in the wet ingredient mixing stage that never went away, as well as storing the dough overnight gave the baking soda enough time to activate on its own by itself so the rising of the cookie wasn’t as effective as it could have been, to cause cracks in the cookie as it expanded and baked.

As for the taste?…So, it tasted interesting. By all accounts, it tastes like a sugar cookie with a spicy kick. After receiving some hesitancy and dubious looks from my housemates, I also convinced them to try some. It’s not a bad cookie but the gochujang kick surprised me. My mouth felt very confused by what it was tasting. Was it sweet or savory? According to one of my housemates, she said that it tasted like a spicier ginger spice cookie.

I don’t like ginger spice cookies.

Overall, these cookies weren’t bad but they’re definitely an acquired taste. Just not part of my acquired taste repertoire. They look cool but these are cookies that I would probably not make again.

I ended up bringing these cookies, along with my sugar cookies, to work with me as part of a spontaneous holiday cookie giveaway.