Purple Ube Boulders 💜

These pretty purple boulders are the first of six Pride Month cookies I made this June. One for each of the colors on the six-stripe pride flag — 🏳️‍🌈.

Their lovely violet hue comes from ube extract. If you've never had ube before, it is a purple yam with a warm floral flavor, used in all manner of Filipino sweets. The flavor is hard to describe well, and the only comparison I can make is somewhere between deeply vanilla and pistachio, with a hint of mellowed-out white chocolate.

Typically ube is used for crinkle cookies, chiffon cakes, and in Halaya, a kind of jam that reminds me of the sweet potato casserole I demand my mother make for every family holiday.

We're aiming for something much closer to a tropical purple chocolate chip cookie, though. Dense, chewy on the inside, and tender-crisp on the outside. I've tried to make these with frozen and powdered ube, but the flavor just isn't concentrated enough to stand out without the extract.

The color can vary a lot based on the brand of Ube Extract you use, so feel free to boost it with some purple gel food dye.

Ingredients

• 4 oz Unsalted Butter, softened
• 4.5 oz Light Brown Sugar
• 1 Large Egg
• 1 tbsp Ube Extract
• 2.5 oz Cake Flour
• 5 oz All-Purpose Flour
• 1 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
• 1 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
• 10-11 oz White Chocolate Chips
• 2 oz Sweetened Shredded Coconut
• Optional, Gel Food Dye

Directions

1. Cream butter and sugar until well combined. Add the egg and Ube extract, and stir until smooth. This recipe isn’t too sensitive, so aeration at this stage isn’t really a concern. Just make sure everything is evenly combined. If you’re adding gel food dye to the cookies, do so now.
2. In another bowl, whisk together the flours, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. Add this to the wet ingredients and fold until nearly all of the flour has been incorporated.
3. Add the chocolate chips and coconut, folding them into the dough with a flexible spatula to distribute them evenly.
4. Using your hands, loosely form 4oz rough mounds of dough on a small parchment-lined baking sheet or dinner plate. You want to maintain their craggy rough exteriors, so be gentle. Don't try to make them smooth or uniform. Once your dough is all portioned, place them in the refrigerator to chill for an hour. You can technically bake them immediately, but unchilled cookies spread much more, and you may only be able to fit two on a pan at once.
5. Preheat your oven to 375°F and bake the chilled cookies four at a time on a parchment lined baking sheet until they’re barely set and golden at the very edge, and dry on top. They should still be puffy in the middle, but not wet. This usually takes 12-18 minutes.
6. Let cool on pan for 30 minutes.