Make your own homemade fortune cookies. Unlike restaurant ones, these taste delicious and you can tuck custom messages inside.
For another dessert, also see this Homemade Apple Crisp recipe and the Perfect Granola.
Tips for Making Fortune Cookies
This is not a typical cookie recipe. It’s a creative challenge.
When I made them, the goal was to make delicious, giant-size fortune cookies with custom fortunes inside.
It took six tries but, once I figured it out, the results were beautiful.
You can jump right to the recipe but please do read the tips as well to save yourself some grief. I struggled so you don’t have to. 🙂
I initially tried several recipes from allrecipes.com and other recipe sites, and one from a popular blog that recommended heating them in a frying pan.
The fried ones turned out like a thick pancake—that weird thing pictured below—and it certainly wasn’t going to form a fortune cookie.
The ones with sugar in the recipe tasted pretty good but didn’t bake right for folding.
Eventually, I came up with the best recipe (below) and I clued in that it’s not just the ingredients that count but how quickly you work to shape them when they come out of the oven.
How Fortune Cookies Are Made
You heat the batter in the oven on stick-free baking mats.
After a few minutes in the oven, the edges turn golden, resembling crepes.
That’s when you remove them from the oven and quickly insert the fortune and fold and shape each cookie.
The shaped cookies are then placed in a muffin tin to hold their shape while they cool.
Here’s some early tries that didn’t quite have the shape I was after (but still tasted great):
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Work Fast
You have one minute from the time they first come out of the oven to insert the fortune and shape them.
Any longer and they crack when you fold them.
So, unless you have a helper, that means working in small batches. I would start with 2-3 cookies in the oven at a time and increase the amount as you improve.
Also, they are hot! I just sucked it up and burned my fingertips making them. If there is such a thing as thin, heat-proof gloves for stuff like this, use them.
Related: Our Best Chocolate Cupcakes
Fortune Ideas
Anything goes! Who are you making these for? You could use jokes, riddles, compliments, reminders, trivia questions, or whatever you like.
We once did a scavenger hunt with all of the clues in the cookies. It took cooperation to get it figured out.
If you have a computer printer and access to Word (or similar software), the templates for making small labels are a good size for fortunes.
Type them on the computer, print and cut them out and have them ready to go before you start cookie making.
Related: How to Make the Best Brownies
Recipe
Empress of Dirt Fortune Cookies
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup Butter melted
- 6 Egg whites
- 1 cup Flour, white, all-purpose white, all purpose
- 1/4 cup Sugar optional
- 1 teaspoon Vanilla extract or almond extract
- ¼ teaspoon Salt
- Vegetable oil spray
- Water if needed to thin batter
Instructions
- Have the fortunes (1x2-inch pieces of paper) ready to go.
- Preheat oven to 325°F (163°C).
Prepare Baking Sheets & Muffin Tins
- Line two baking sheets with silicone baking mats.
- Lightly spray silicone mats and muffin tins with vegetable cooking spray.
Prepare Batter
- Beat egg whites until frothy but not firm.
- Whisk in melted butter, vanilla extract, and salt.
- Gradually add flour (and sugar if you want them sweeter) until completely combined with texture of runny pancake batter. Add more melted butter if batter is too thick.
Bake the Cookies
- Spoon batter onto baking mats forming 4-inch wide circles, not too thick.
- Start with just a few while learning how to fold them (next).
- Bake until edges are slightly golden (approximately 3-5 minutes).
Shape the Cookies (1 Minute or Less)
- Remove cookies from oven and immediately flip them over on the baking mat.
- Place fortune in middle of circle and fold cookie over it to form a half moon shape.
- Gently pinch the two corners and bring them together, then place cookie in muffin tin to help hold them in place.
- Leave cookies in muffin tin on kitchen counter for an hour. They will become firmer but remain chewy.
- Store in airtight container up to one week. Can also be frozen for 3 months.
Notes
- I use cooking spray even though the silicone mat and muffin tin may already be stick-free because I found this batter tends to be clingy.
- Do not worry if your cookies do not look like mine: have fun making them and come up with your own unique shapes.
- They are already baked when you're shaping them, so thickness does not matter at that point.
- You may not get 12 cookies from the basic recipe: it may be fewer or more depending on how thick you pour the batter.
- Instead of adding fortunes insides, you could put a dollop of melted chocolate.
- Or, dip half the cookie in melted chocolate.
Nutrition (per serving)
If you make them, I’d love to hear how it goes. As said, I had to play with recipes and methods quite a bit before figuring out what works. Hopefully this will save you some experiments.
~Melissa the Empress of Dirt ♛
Melissa J. Will says
Fun to make if you like creative baking. They taste great. Unique idea for bake sales and parties.