Eggnog Coconut Macaroons: The Macaroon Bible

This coconut macaroon recipe is spiced with bourbon and nutmeg for an eggnog cookie treat just right for the holiday season.


It starts just as the sun is tucking itself away, the snow falling as the light dims and turns grey. Then darkness settles in, soaking the color from the once vibrant landscape. The heavy flakes rest on sidewalks, their white contrasting against the black of night, catching in your hair and eyelashes causing you to blink heavily. By morning the grass is gone, covered in a thin blanket of white, nearly transparent.

Then it begins again, the onslaught of winter. On and off for the next two days, the sky a dirty grey to match the piles of slush on the street between the tire tread. Boots are unearthed from closets, gloves matched and worn as necessary as temperatures drop and snow lands heavily on the pavement. Winter is here to stay.

Sometime yesterday – perhaps as I was accompanying Lene’s 2nd grade field trip to the Minneapolis Central Library after a slow, snowy bus ride and a walk down the city streets in the midst of the winter storm warning – I resigned myself to this fact. Watching as life continued to move, I remembered that there is something to this resilient nature forced on us by the climate. Besides, it is prohibited to voice discontent regarding the snow until mid-January.

The logical thing to do when snow is falling is to bake, and so in the last three days I have had my oven on more than it has been off. It serves a dual purpose, simultaneously warming my otherwise cold kitchen area and making the house smell like Christmas. Do you know what Christmas smells like? Spice.

All manner of cinnamon and cardamom and nutmeg has been through the oven this week, sage and thyme had a little party on the stovetop, and even the honey and maple syrup mingled in the broiler depths of my home’s central heating unit. (Furnaces are overrated.) I call this cookie prep.

I am a last-minute baker, often wrapping fresh-from-the-oven pies and cookies in insulating towels before placing them on my children’s laps as we hurry of to some family function. On Thanksgiving this looked like an 8 a.m. cheesecake baked and then left to cool while we attended one family dinner, and then picked up on our way to the second.

However, if you differ in your holiday baking habits and are one who can horde the cookies away in the freezer in advance, these macaroons will happily join your clan. They freeze well, which makes now a perfect time to bake and squirrel away until your holiday party/Christmas dinner/New Year’s Eve festivities. They are spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and a good shot of bourbon, which plays nicely against the crisp and chewy coconut base.

Things you should know about me:

1. I can’t leave well enough alone.
2. I hate leaving the house.

The combination of these two things resulted in using exactly what I had on hand when making these macaroons the second time around when I needed to photograph them. This required me to make a homemade sweetened condensed coconut milk and to use unsweetened coconut, which I seem to have an overabundance of in my freezer. In order to account for the dry nature of the unsweetened coconut versus the sweetened variety, I left all the liquid measurements in their original quantities, even though I was working with fewer ounces of coconut. I also upped the ratio of sweetened condensed milk to coconut in order to account for some of the dryness and lack of sugary sweet coconut going in. The original recipe as published in the book is below for those of you who want to try it instead. I made both. The unsweetened coconut are a bit chewier and have a different texture than the sweetened on account of the way the coconut is treated. They also happen to look like a snowball. Both satisfied my coconut macaroon cravings and were perfectly boozy and eggnog-spiced.

I unabashedly love shredded coconut, whether it’s eaten directly from the bag as I used to do as a child, sprinkled in cookies, toasted for topping cakes, in seven-layer bars, or baked into sweet chewy balls of macaroons. Macaroons I seek out and destroy, even preferring them to their French macaron cousins. I was rather excited to crack open The Macaroon Bible and was not disappointed. Inside you’ll find helpful tips and step-by-step photos, as well as creative recipes that take a solid basic macaroon recipe and run with it. From peanut butter and jelly macaroons to macaroon sandwich shells and s’mores, there’s a little something for everyone in this book by Danny Macaroon founder Dan Cohen. In addition to these bourbon-spiked eggnog beauties, I can’t wait to try the salted caramel and the apricot. You can enter to win a copy of the book down below courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt!