Toasted Coconut Sugar Cookies

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Say hello to summer in cookie form with toasted coconut sugar cookies! These sweet, buttery sugar cookies are full of tropical flavor with that soft, chewy texture everyone loves. Plus, they're incredibly simple to make for even the beginner baker. You won't find a more perfect summer cookie.

A plate of toasted coconut sugar cookies with coconut on the side and flowers and milk in the background.

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Why You'll Love This Recipe
Ingredients
Step-by-Step Instructions
Recipe FAQs
Expert Tips
Perfect Pairing
Can't Get Enough Cookies?
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Why You'll Love This Recipe

With summer here, you need a delicious but easy and portable dessert for all your backyard barbecuing needs -- something that can hold up to the hottest temperatures without refrigeration. No fussy preparation is required, and serving is as simple as grab and go for a casual evening.

Enter these toasted coconut sugar cookies! Not only do these little treats check all the aforementioned boxes, but they're also bakery-style sugar cookies as opposed to those puffier, more cake-like sugar cookies used for extra fancy decorating. And let's be honest. That's the best kind of sugar cookie.

Bakery-style sugar cookies have a tender, chewy bite with a crinkly top and buttery, moist base. Those more decorative sugar cookies tend to have a drier, almost crumbly texture. Plus, the toasted coconut adds even more chewiness. If you're all about a chewy texture, these cookies were made for you.

Bonus: If you love these tropical coconut cookies, be sure to also check out my macadamia nut-coconut chocolate chip cookies and butterscotch-coconut-bourbon cookies!

Ingredients

And those are all the ingredients you need. As you can see, everything should be easy to find in the grocery store, which is yet another reason to love this recipe.

For the coconut, I used sweetened coconut. I just love flavor you get from the sweetened variety, and it's more commonly used in baking. That said, you could also substitute it with unsweetened coconut. While unsweetened coconut is a bit drier and chewier, it will work.

Step-by-Step Instructions

How to Toast Coconut

I like to toast coconut on the stove in a skillet, and the process couldn't be simpler.

Step 1: We toss a bunch of coconut into a nonstick skillet and cook over medium heat (photo 1). Every so often, we give the skillet a shake to keep the coconut from burning.

After several minutes, our coconut will brown like so (photo 2) and turn fragrant. Now we're ready to move on to the rest of our cookie recipe.

A collage showing the process of toasting the coconut in a skillet.

The rest of this recipe is similar to making your typical drop cookies. Unless you're a cookie rookie, this process should feel familiar.

Step 2: We start by stirring together our flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt and setting that aside (photo 3).

The dry ingredients mixed together in a glass bowl.

Step 3: In a large mixing bowl, we add softened butter and sugar and beat until it's light and fluffy like so (photo 4).

The butter and sugar after it's been creamed together in a mixing bowl.

Step 4: From here, we add in vanilla extract and coconut extract for an extra dose of tropical flavor as well as freshly squeezed lemon juice. We then beat in our eggs one at a time (photo 5). We want to add in our eggs one at a time to prevent overbeating, so don't just throw them in all at once, thinking it doesn't matter.

Beating in the eggs one at a time in the mixing bowl.

Step 6: Now we stir in a little of our flour mixture at a time (photo 6) and repeat the process until we incorporate all of the dry ingredients (photo 7).

Beating in some of the flour with the egg and sugar mixture in a large bowl.

Step 7: Once the flour is all incorporated, we add our toasted coconut (photo 8 and 9), and we're ready to refrigerate our dough.

Adding the toasted coconut to the mixing bowl with the dough.

Step 8: After refrigerating, we shape our dough into golf ball-size dough balls by rolling them in our hands and then place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

The cookie dough on a baking sheet ready for the oven.

Step 9: After baking, we place the cookies on a wire rack to cool, but do yourself a favor and treat yourself to a coconut sugar cookie while it's still warm.

Tip: For an extra decadent touch, sprinkle some homemade vanilla sugar right when they come out of the oven! You'll love the extra vanilla flavor with the toasted coconut.

And if you'd like to check out more summery cookies, you'll also adore these limoncello Italian wedding cookies.

Recipe FAQs

Why refrigerate cookie dough?

Before baking, we need to refrigerate this cookie dough for at least an hour. Yes, I realize this might be annoying, but if we don't refrigerate the dough, the cookies will overspread in the oven. The butter in the dough needs some time to firm back up before it hits that hot environment.

So go enjoy a little Netflix time, come back in an hour and the cookie dough will be ready for baking, which just takes nine minutes per batch.

When the toasted coconut sugar cookies come out of the oven, they may look slightly underbaked, but that just means you did it correctly. This ensures our cookies stay perfectly soft and chewy after cooling.

Do you have to use parchment paper on the baking sheet?

Yes. To prevent overspreading, you want to place the unbaked cookie dough on parchment paper with no cooking spray. If you have a silicone baking mat, you can use that as well.

Can you roll out this sugar cookie dough?

This recipe is designed to be for drop sugar cookies, not cut-out sugar cookies. These are more of your chewy sugar cookies rather than the more cake-like type that you decorate with royal icing.

Looking down onto a plate of coconut sugar cookies with pink flowers behind it.

Expert Tips

When measuring your flour and sugar, don't scoop the cup into bag. That packs in too much of our ingredient. Instead, spoon into the measuring cup and use a knife to level off any excess.
Make sure your eggs are room temperature before beating. Room-temperature eggs incorporate much better than cold eggs. Simply allow them to sit for 30 minutes in room temperature. If you forget, place them in warm -- not hot -- water for 10 minutes.
The lemon juice adds a nice brightness, but it also activates the baking soda, so don't skip this ingredient, thinking it's just for an extra flavor boost.
For beating the cookie dough, I use my Kitchenaid mixer to handle this step. Three to four minutes of beating the sugar and butter on speed four works well for me. A hand mixer also works -- just make sure you give this step a few minutes of beating to incorporate enough air into the mixture.

Perfect Pairing

Beer and cookies are one of my favorite pairings, and I love an imperial stout with these toasted coconut sugar cookies. The inherent sweetness from the high alcohol content makes it perfect for all sorts of desserts, and coconut is a delicious match to that roasted malt.

For wine, an oaked chardonnay is a fun match. Oak barrels often impart a coconut flavor, and the buttery chardonnay fits perfectly with our cookie dough base. A riesling is another delicious option.

And, of course, if you want to really play up the coconut flavor, you can't go wrong with tropical cocktails. My coconut margarita and coconut-watermelon mojito are obvious choices.

When you need the perfect summer treat, I hope you try these toasted coconut sugar cookies. You'll love that tropical flavor packed into one delicious treat.

Cheers!

A toasted coconut sugar cookie split in half to show the chewy texture.

Can't Get Enough Cookies?

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Comments

5 from 53 votes (34 ratings without comment)