Identical in flavor and appearance of those from a Chinese restaurant! With my first effort at making these, I was quite happy! You can make fantastic favors for any occasion by adding your own personalized phrase! For other events, I’ve instead rolled them into cigar-like tubes and filled them with icing, which has proved a hit with the crowd!
| Prep Time: | 15 mins |
| Cook Time: | 10 mins |
| Total Time: | 25 mins |
| Servings: | 36 |
| Yield: | 36 servings |
Ingredients
- 3 egg whites
- ¾ cup white sugar
- ½ cup butter, melted and cooled
- ¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¼ teaspoon almond extract
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoons water
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets, or line with parchment paper. Have fortunes ready to go on small strips of paper.
- In a large glass or metal bowl, whip egg whites and sugar on high speed of an electric mixer until frothy, about 2 minutes. Reduce speed to low, and stir in melted butter, vanilla, almond extract, water and flour one at a time, mixing well after each. Consistency should resemble pancake batter. Spoon the batter into 3 inch circles on the prepared baking sheets. Leave room between for spreading.
- Bake for 5 to 7 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges begin to brown slightly. Quickly remove one at a time, place a message in the center, and fold in half. Fold the ends of the half together into a horse shoe shape. If they spring open, place them in a muffin tin to cool until set.
- Although these cookies are not malleable if overbaked, you need to bake them long enough until they are golden around the edges or they will be too under baked and remain soft, spongy and pancake-like. Enjoy!
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 53 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 7 g |
| Cholesterol | 7 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 0 g |
| Protein | 1 g |
| Saturated Fat | 2 g |
| Sodium | 23 mg |
| Sugars | 4 g |
| Fat | 3 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
Maybe because I live at 7000 ft., but these cookies are NOT easy. They turned out too spongey, so I thinned the batter and they were still a little to spongey. Couldn’t bend them to shape them without the cookie breaking (they were barely golden around the edge, as suggested). I don’t know if it was my elevation or this is just a really difficult recipe – beware. They tasted great though.
The recipe “as is” has problems. I always make a recipe as it states the first time and this one needs lots of help. First–way too much butter. Next time, I’d cut the butter almost by half. Also, batter too thick. I’d add more liquid next time. They are also kind of tasteless and not very sweet, but the flavor and mouth feel could have been dampened by the excess butter called for in the recipe. I think they’d also be better with unsalted butter.
It did take me a couple of tries to get it right. I tried to add more water, didn’t spread it thin enough. I ended up Baking on a silicone baking pad and parchment paper. (Alternating pans, 2 at a time, both worked, just make sure parchment doesn’t get wrinkles). I doubled the recipe twice, had to make 135 cookies for coworkers. I found that following the recipe precisely and thinning out to about 4” diameter circles allowed me to put the fortune in without it getting stuck.
I went for 350 on a baking sheet, thin tablespoon spread on warm pan for approximately 8-9 minutes
The batter was very thick and even after thinning. They didn’t look like the picture at all.
I tested two fortune cookie recipes and this one was the winner. I made these fortune cookies as a class activity with my daughter’s fourth grade class. They were delicious! The kids made up the fortunes and I took them home and baked them up. I made the recipe as directed except I did need to add extra water to thin the batter out a bit in order to get the pancake batter” consistency. I also found it helpful to heat the cookie sheet in the oven before putting the batter on it as previous reviewers suggested. I will definitely make these again!
Made the cookies 3 inch circles and they expanded to be huge!!!!! Way too difficult to fold. Trying again now and hopefully it turns out better. Any tips?
The cooked batter was delicious. However, I don’t know what I was doing wrong but these were hardly easy. The batter is super thick, I had to add a good 4 more tablespoons of water to make it thin enough to spread thinly. If at all too thick, they end up like crepes. They don’t cook evenly so the edges may be brown but the middle is still spongy and cracks when you try to fold them. Folding them is a slightly painfully hot experience, not recommended for kids with tender fingers! I consider myself a fairly experienced cook and baker and just can’t figure out what went wrong here… I give it 5 stars for taste, but 2 for end result!
I thought of making these for my two kids’ Valentine’s day card distributions at school and I thought it would be so cute to put personal fortunes inside. I just made these tonight (over 70 of them so I had to more than double the recipe). To be honest, I was a bit nervous these might not turn out well…but, guess what, they turned out great! Maybe because I was doing so many at once I got the hang of it after folding about two of them. What helped me was when I was at Walmart, during Valentine’s season, they had a “fortune making kit” that sold for $9 (to make 10 cookies) and I just thought that was so expensive, I decided to copy their pictures that showed how to fold them (which helped tremendously, by the way). The parchment paper is the way to go because I used a spatula to remove them and they came right off. When they were nice and golden brown on the edges, what I did was take only one out at a time so I can concentrate on the shape. So, using the “Walmart” fortune cookie making kit method, after I placed the fortune inside, I folded it in half, used a rim of a mug to place the middle of the cookie on the rim and then folded the outer two edges down, which helped shape the cookies to their natural fortune cookie shape, just like the ones you find at a Chinese restaurant! It ended up being so easy to make. I had fun making them but they were definitely labor intensive and the fact that I was making over 70, it took me several hours to finish the entire batch.
it was good
I added just one more TBSP of water and they came out GREAT!! The whole family LOVED them. Saving this recipe to make again 🙂 thanks for sharing.
Plan on making two batches — the first one to get the hang of it and the second one to share with others. I would not call this an easy recipe…
ummm, I don’t think fortune cookies should have butter in them… it makes them too chewy and the fortunes just absorb the grease so they’re all translucent. It was an easy recipe and they tasted good…but I wouldn’t make them again.
This recipe did not work at all for me. I tried several times and was so excited to use it, but it really did not work. Disappointed…. After reading everyone else’s comments, I have to agree, the batter needs a lot of thinning, and it would really have helped to have two people working on it instead of one. The cookies need to be immediately used on removing from oven, and crepe-thin. Too labor intensive for what I was intending, which was to make a whole bunch of them in one evening. The cookies themselves, while failures as fortune cookies, were delicious.
My kids and I made fortune cookies for valentines day at school. Since we were making so many we had a chance to try multiple recipes, 6 to be exact. One was from Martha Stewart, one from Paula Dean, others from different online recipe sites and this recipe. We saved one cookie from each recipe and had a fun family taste test. The results……This cookie is the WINNER!! Best tasting, easiest to make, not to thick, JUST RIGHT! Thanks
DUBSTEPPPPPPPP. im making these for my school project. Bhargav loves Harrison.
OMG!OMG! First of all the recipe does not tell you how thin to make the 3 inch circles. I made the frist batch and they turned into chips. Second batch was too thick. The batter was not teh consistency of pancake batter so I had to add more water to thin it out.
Tried many different ways to bake/fold these with no good cookies. Too cake like. Imagine trying to fold a sugar cookie. The under baked ones crumbled and the over baked ones broke while the cookies baked exactly according to the directions folded like paper then broke. Too greasy so the papers became illegible after absorbing the grease.
Ok, so the cookies are delish, but if there is one thing I learned from studying in culinary school in hong kong that when making the cookie all you do when at the folding part is to fold them in half and lightly press the folded part on the edge of a glass you know like the rim until they are the desired shape:P
What a disaster! I will not be making these again. I must have done something wrong but I will not give it another try.
I had to add more water too. And my son can’t have nuts so I did lemon extract. They are great.