Strawberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Strawberry white chocolate chip cookies from scratch are easier to make than you’d think! This easy strawberry cookie recipe results in soft, sweet, naturally strawberry-flavored cookies everyone will love.

Do you know that you can make strawberry cookies without a box of cake mix? In fact, you can make strawberries and cream cookies from scratch, without added color if you’d like, and still keep a beautiful chewy texture?

Well, you can with this recipe, and I’m so excited to share it with you today!

I’ve always loved the flavor combination of strawberries and cream. It’s just a classic! My easy stabilized whipped cream literally features this exact combination in the photos. Therefore, it’s just natural that this strawberry cookie recipe plays on those flavors to create a perfect Valentine’s Day or spring cookie recipe!

The best part is, the strawberry flavor here is all-natural – no cake box mix needed – and you don’t even need to add any artificial color if you don’t want to.

In this post, I’m going to give you all the details and all the tips you need for baking your own. Please do come back and tell me how you rapid-fire baked 3 batches in as many days because everyone loved them. That’s what I did!

Flavor profile & texture for the strawberry white chocolate chip cookies

As I said, these white chocolate chip cookies combine the flavors of cream and strawberries. The magic happens in the dough. These cookies have a cream cheese dough.

Cream cheese in cookie dough adds moisture to the recipe and makes the cookies a bit softer. You know that I’m a fan of soft cookies though. I have an orange cream cheese cookie recipe here.

One of the reasons I prefer these strawberry cookies to the ones made with cake mix is that they aren’t overly sweet. The cream cheese cuts the sweetness in the recipe, giving it a more balanced bite. We want this so we can add lots of chocolate chips.

Fun side note: These cookies are just as good with dark chocolate chips as with white chocolate chips. Dark chocolate chips give you a more “chocolate-covered strawberries” vibe.

The second reason I really like these cookies is that the strawberry flavor is natural and EASY to achieve.

We here at Goodie Godmother are not above a kitchen project and slightly involved recipe. But as practical bakers, we also do not believe in unnecessary work. This is especially true since there is no “we” baking in this kitchen unless I have the littles and we all know that – as lovely as baking with children can be – it’s not the time to tackle involved recipes. 😉

Exactly how do we keep this recipe simple? We use freeze-dried strawberries to add flavor! If you haven’t baked with freeze-dried fruit before, this is the time to start. Darlings, it’s game-changing for adding fruit flavors to so many recipes.

What is the difference between dried fruit and freeze-dried fruit?

Freeze-dried fruit is different than dried fruit. Normally, when many of us think of dried fruit, we are thinking of basically dehydrated fruit. The texture of dried fruit is chewy, and we often find bits of dried fruit in mueslis, granola, oatmeal, trail mix, etc.

Freeze-dried fruit, on the other hand, is processed differently and has no remaining moisture. You can easily smash the fruit into a powder for use in all sorts of recipes. For example, I’ve started experimenting with adding freeze-dried fruit to my macaron recipes.

While familiar with it, I’d hesitated using it in recipes for the blog until recently, because it’s really frustrating to find a great-looking recipe and not be able to source the ingredients! Thankfully, everyone else has caught on to how versatile freeze-dried fruit can be, and you can find it basically everywhere. I bought a big bag recently at Target – from their house brand!

To make sure you’re picking up the correct product, look for the bags that feel very light, and the fruit sounds solid when you shake it. Chewy dried fruit doesn’t work the same in this recipe.

Can I make these strawberry cookies without artificial color?

Yes and no depending on the look you’re going for. As with my raspberry cake recipe, adding a bit of artificial color isn’t required, but you won’t get a very vibrant pink.

Even with the naturally occurring pigment in the freeze-dried fruit, the final color will be a dustier pink than in the photos here. I added just a drop of pink gel color for a more photogenic look.

Thankfully, if avoiding artificial colors is something you’d prefer to do, and you don’t wish to use one of the natural food colorings available on the market, you can skip coloring. When not making this recipe for pictures, I’ve forgotten to add the color, and it definitely doesn’t affect flavor.

I hope you love this strawberry cream cheese cookie recipe, darlings. Happy baking!