You’re in for a SERIOUS treat as these salted brown butter butterscotch oatmeal cookies are inspired by one of my favorite cookies in Chicago.
About a year ago, Abra started telling me about these amazing cookies at Beatrix, one of our go-to restaurants in Chicago. One night after dinner, we decided to get the salty butterscotch oatmeal cookie from their bakery and from that point on, it’s been my new favorite. It’s crunchy on the outside, has a chewy texture in the middle, is sweet, salty, full of butterscotch chips, oats and absolutely delicious.
I thought about how I could recreate the cookies to make an exact version and after several rounds of testing I’m SO happy with the result. This recipe is one of my favorite cookie recipes ever.
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Ingredients in these butterscotch oatmeal cookies
These chewy butterscotch oatmeal cookies, or “oatmeal scotchies” as some people call them, are super easy to make and have some special ingredients that make them incredible. Here’s what you’ll need to make them:
- Butter: we’re, of course, browning the butter to give the recipe a caramel flavor and a unique nutty flavor. If you don’t know how to brown butter, I have a tutorial here.
- Brown sugar: these cookies are made with brown sugar only (no granulated sugar). It keeps the cookies chewy in the middle and adds a hint of molasses flavor.
- Eggs: you’ll need 2 eggs in this cookie recipe.
- Flour: we’re using regular all purpose flour for the perfect texture.
- Oats: we use rolled oats in this recipe to give it a nice texture. Trust me, they’re perfect so please don’t use quick oats.
- Cornflakes: yes, you read that right! Cornflakes are added to the dough to give the cookies a crunch factor. I know it seems a little odd, but trust me, they are necessary.
- Butterscotch chips: who doesn’t love butterscotch morsels? Of course, if they aren’t your thing you could always use regular chocolate chips (or maybe a mix of both YUM).
- Baking staples: don’t forget the vanilla extract, baking soda, and salt. Learn how to make your own vanilla here!
- Maldon salt: you know, the fancy salt. Coarse sea salt also works! It’s sprinkled over the cookies.
A note on substitutions
Please be sure to make the recipe as-is so that the oatmeal butterscotch cookies come out perfectly. If you’re looking for a gluten free alternative, check out all of my gluten free cookies here.
I haven’t tested a vegan version of the cookies, but let me know if you try it with flax eggs. You’ll then have to use vegan butter, which you cannot brown.
Can I use quick oats or steel cut oats?
I would not recommend swapping the rolled oats for steel cut or quick oats as the texture will be very different.
Choose your cookie mix-ins
I LOVE the flavor of butterscotch in these cookies, but you can feel free to swap the butterscotch chips for any other mix-ins like:
- White chocolate or dark chocolate chips
- Dried cranberries, raisins, or dried cherries
- Peanut butter chips (yum!)
Looking for thicker cookies?
Feel free to add an extra 2-3 tablespoons of flour to the dough!
Don’t forget these tips for perfect butterscotch oatmeal cookies
- Do not use substitutes. Please be sure to follow the recipe as written unless substitutes are noted. Changing the flour will likely affect the taste and texture of these cookies.
- Use room temp ingredients. After you brown your butter you’ll want to make sure that it is cool so that it doesn’t coagulate with the other ingredients. The same goes for your eggs — simply run the eggs under warm water for about a minute (or place them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes) before adding them to your dough.
- Use fresh baking soda. Make sure your baking soda is fresh to ensure that these butterscotch cookies bake up properly.
- Measure your flour correctly. Do you know the best way to measure flour without a scale? Get my tips & tricks in this video!
Storing & freezing tips
- To store: store these butterscotch oatmeal cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days.
- To freeze: you can actually freeze the cookie dough OR the freshly baked cookies to enjoy later! Get all of my tips and tricks for freezing cookies here.
More cookie recipes you’ll love
- Death by Chocolate Peppermint Cookies
- Melt In Your Mouth Italian Iced Orange Cookies
- The Best Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies You’ll Ever Eat
- Old Fashioned Iced Brown Butter Oatmeal Cookies
- Brown Butter Snickerdoodle Cookies
Get all of my cookie recipes here!
I really hope you get a chance to bake these butterscotch oatmeal cookies for family & friends! If you make them be sure to leave a comment and a rating so I know how you liked them.
Ambitious Kitchen
Cookbook
125 Ridiculously Good For You, Sometimes Indulgent, and Absolutely Never Boring Recipes for Every Meal of the Day
Salted Brown Butter Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks)
- 1 1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
- 2 cups cornflakes (I used Kellogg’s)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup butterscotch chips
- Fancy Maldon sea salt, for sprinkling on top
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a large cookie sheet with parchment paper.
- Melt butter in a medium skillet or pan over medium heat. After a few minutes, the butter will begin to crackle and then foam. Make sure you whisk constantly during this process. After a minute or two, the butter will begin to brown on the bottom of the saucepan. Continue to whisk and remove from heat as soon as the butter begins to brown, turn a golden amber color and give off a nutty almost hazelnut-like aroma.
- Immediately transfer the butter to a bowl to prevent burning but make sure you scrape all the yummy brown bits from the pan with a rubber spatula; this is where the flavor is! Set brown butter aside to cool for 5-10 minutes.
- Add every last bit of brown butter and brown sugar to the bowl of an electric mixer and mix on medium-high until well combined, about 1 minute.
- Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract until smooth and creamy, about 1 minute.
- Add the dry ingredients: flour, oats, cornflakes, baking soda and salt. Beat on medium speed until just combined, about 1 minute. The cornflakes should be well blended into the dough.
- Lastly add in butterscotch chips and mix on low speed until just combined.
- Use a medium cookie scoop to grab about 1 large heaping tablespoons of dough. Drop on prepared cookie sheet, leaving at least 2 inches of space between each cookie. Bake for 9-11 minutes or until golden brown on the edges.
- Allow cookies to cool on the cookie sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling completely. Sprinkle cookies with a little fancy sea salt and serve. Makes 2 dozen cookies. Feel free to double the recipe to serve more!
Recipe Notes
Nutrition
Recipe by: Monique Volz // Ambitious Kitchen Photography by: Yoga of Cooking
96 comments
Can you make these with GF flour? They sound delicious, but I’d need to make them GF.
whenever I use 1:1 GF flour, I usually reduce the flour by a bit just FYI! In this, personally, I might reduce it by 2 tbsp!
I’ve only made them as-is, but you could try reducing the GF flour a bit like Ema suggests above!
These sounds fabulous & I’ll be trying them this weekend. Do you have a recommendation for a brand of butterscotch chips!
I hope you love them! I don’t use a specific brand of butterscotch chips (just grab the ones I see at the store 🙂 ).
I bought Nestle Butterscotch chips. They are artificially flavored. They have a persistent chemical smell and flavor. Try to find a different brand. My grocery store only sells Nestle.
These sound SO delish!!!
They’re seriously amazing!
Yay! I made these last night and they were a big hit with my son. i think it’s the first time he’s loved oatmeal cookies! Personally for me, they’re a little too sweet. I brought them in for my coworkers today. We’ll see what they say!! Thank you!
So happy to hear that! These cookies are on the sweeter side with the butterscotch, but glad your son enjoyed and hope your coworkers did too!
I know this comment is from like 5 years ago but changed the recipe up a bit and used 2 cups oatmeal and then instead of cornflakes, I swapped and used 1 cup of potato chips. It cut down on the sweetness and people loves the unique texture
BOMB AF COOKIES!!! I did everything by the recipes and just switched the butterscotch chips for choc chips. Sooooo good!!!!! 😍😍
Perfect!! So glad you loved them <3
Hi Monique, does look DELISH but I’m gluten intorlerant and will love to make those! I was thinking of using gluten free oats and making my oats flour un the food processor…what do you think? I could also use quinoa flour or my homemade gluten free flour mix. Do you have any thought on this for me . Thanks ahead ! 🤗
Hi Trish! I would use a gluten free all purpose flour in place of the regular flour 🙂
Wow! These look so yummy! I’ll do this on Christmas eve! 🙂
They are! Perfect for Christmas Eve 🙂 Enjoy!
Made a 1/2 batch today to try them and they really are delicious! They are on the sweet side but I have to say the texture was awesome! They make a good size cookie and will make a full batch next time I make them:). Thanks for the recipe!
Absolutely! The butterscotch is on the sweeter side. Glad you like them!
Butterscotch chips are way too sweet (and fake) tasting to me. Switched up the recipe and added Dark Chocolate chips and toasted pecans instead of the Butterscotch chips. Huge hit with everyone. Added 3 Tbls. Of flour because I don’t like flat cookes. Thank you for the inspiration!
These are great for customizing – glad you loved them with those swaps!
I made these a thank you to my colleagues for being so great. They were a huge hit! I figured one batch would be enough, everyone would have one. A lot of folks had two or more they were so good. The sea salt finish really made these cookies top notch.
The recipe yielded 28 cookies rather than 24, which I’m not complaining about 🙂
Amazing! Glad everyone loved them 🙂
I made the. Twice this week….they are soooooo good. I added nuts…gotta have nuts in my cookies
Perfect!!
I know I’m a month late to the December cookie train (new year new cookies, amirite?) but these are soooo good. I love butterscotch and oatmeal! Way underrated as a cookie type, IMHO.
Never too late for cookies! LOVE this combo – glad you do too 🙂
I used Nestle Butterscotch chips. Won’t make that mistake again. The pervasive chemical taste and odor ruined the cookies for me. Next time I’ll either look harder for natural flavor or used chocolate chips. I love the texture though. I’ll make the again.
Sorry to hear that, Carolyn! They’re delicious with regular chocolate chips as well.
Loved the cookies but didn’t care for corn flakes. Could I eliminate cornflakes and replace with flour? If so, can you suggest how much flour? Thanks!
Sure that would probably work. Try adding 1/4 cup extra flour.
So so yummy! Made these for Easter and they were a hit. I would maybe forego some of the salt on top. I liked it with the salt, but maybe just half salt and half without could be a good option. I think this could be great with some ice cream and a bit of caramel sauce! Thanks for all the recipes!
Glad everyone loved them! And yes the sea salt on top is just a taste & “look” preference 🙂 These would be amazing with ice cream and caramel sauce!
I made these for Christmas and they were fabulous. I am actually making them for a baking competition next month but Inhave tweaked the recipe a bit and 1 c corn flaked 1 c of kettle chips and I also toasted my oats before putting them in! Loving the brown butter element and want to try it all my cookies!!
Amazing!! Glad you enjoyed 🙂
Heath toffee chips!!! I made these by the recipe with the exception of the butterscotch chips as I subbed Heath toffee pieces/chips. Perfect sweetness and flavor! I made them the first time with butterscotch chips and they were way too sweet (for me). The toffee chips were perfect. Best cookie recipe ever.
Great idea with the toffee chips! Glad you loved them 🙂
I am a baking snob. I do not bake anything that is not over the top delicious. These fit the bill. I will never not brown butter again. This recipe is the difference between ho hum and worthy of leaving my kitchen. Thank you.
Isn’t the brown butter amazing?? So glad you found and loved these ones, Lynn!
These cookies were easy to make and so delicious. I am using them as part of a cookie exchange.
So glad you loved them! Perfect for a cookie exchange 🙂
Love the flavor, but something with my batch didn’t turn out right. The dough wouldn’t stay together and the cookies spread a lot so turned out flat and very brittle. My only thought is maybe I didn’t cool the butter long enough
Oh no! So strange! That could definitely be it, especially if you followed the recipe exactly. Glad you loved the flavor!
Like others have said the butterscotch chips made the cookies nearly inedible for me. The artificial taste was difficult to get past. The cookies were also a bit too sweet for liking. Not sure if that was due to the butterscotch or the recipe itself. I like my sweets on the less sweet side, so this if fairly normal for me.
I wasn’t sure if the cornflakes should be left whole or crushed prior to being added. They (corn flakes) ended up being a bit hard/tough when baked. I did mix the ingredients by hand so it’s possible they remained whole instead of being broken up my the mixing process.
I will give it another go. Cutting back on the sugar, using chocolate chips, and crushing the corn flakes.
Hi! This cookie is meant to be a sweeter, more indulgent one, so it might not be the best one to try if you like your desserts less sweet (this category of healthy cookies might be a better place to look: https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/healthy-cookies/) As for the cornflakes: if you make these with an electric mixer usually the cornflakes ‘crush’ a bit; since you mixed by hand they probably stayed more whole.
Have made these cookies three times in less than two weeks. I’ve gotten requests for this recipe. It is DEEEEELICIOUS. thank you.
Amazing! So happy to hear that!
These cookies are absolutely amazing!!! The only thing I modified was a full bag of butterscotch chips and some smashed butterscotch candy mixed with the sea salt!!!
YUM! Glad you loved them!
This cookie was fabulous. I was Googleing for a recipe for to use butterscotch chips other than blondies and the usual ones and came across this insane cookie. Hurry and make these you won’t be disappointed.
So good! Glad you loved them!
First time I’ve ever browned butter, so thank you for that! These cookies turned out really really amazingly!! I skipped on the butterscotch/chocolate chips, though. I made half the recipe, and still ended up with 24 regular sized cookies… so I’m wondering how giant your cookies are if you also make 24 cookies with twice the ingredients hahaha. Thanks for an amazing recipe!
So glad you loved them!! Haha oh man! maybe your cookies were a bit smaller than mine, but mine were pretty average.
I just baked half a recipe and I’m wondering if you can freeze the dough and save it for later? There are only three of us and…well…I fear 24 cookies might just be too tempting!
Absolutely! Great idea.
Soooo delicious! Will definitely make time and time again. And recommend to friends. I even left out both the Butterscotch and Corn Flakes. And used baking powder instead of soda (oops!). 10/10!!!
I’m glad they still turned out! 🙂
These are great! If you’re gf (like me) they still turned out fantastic. I used cup for cup King Arthur’s gf flour, Bob’s Red Mill gf oats, and corn Chex instead of cornflakes (all the cornflakes I found in the stores had malt in them). Delicious & easy.
I’m glad that worked out well! 🙂
Wow! These are sooo good! A gooey middle (baked for 9 min) and sweet with a slight nutty flavor the brown butter gives. I love these so much. I should add that I didn’t have cornflakes, but added the extra flour Monique recommended in one of the comments.
Absolutely! So glad you liked them 🙂
Great recipe! I was not sure about the corn flakes, I used the Kroger brand, but after I put together the batter I loved the texture it added to the dough. And I was sold after I tried the first cookie, amazing! The sea salt sprinkle on top was a great balance to the sweetness of the cookie. My family is already requesting more of these!
These were my favorite cookies this year and I ended up making two batches. I added dried cherries to the recipe. The sea salt on top is key.
So happy to hear that! Love the idea of adding dried cherries.
Want to make these for Easter! Can you substitute the dark brown sugar for light, or any other sugar? Would this dough be good to be Nutella filled, if the choco chips are omitted?
Yes, light brown sugar works just fine! I wouldn’t recommend adding Nutella to the filling as they will bake up differently but feel free to top them if you’d like.
Love your cooking page.. I make everything you most and they come out fantastic!! Just a question, for your Salted Brown Butter Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies ( are you able to post a video on how you make these) i’m just a little confused as to when I add the cornflakes am I supposed to break the cornflakes so they’re in crushes or just add it in. I also don’t use a hand mixer or KitchenAid.. I use a wooden spoon
Hi! Feel free to just add them as-is – it’s okay if they break up a bit when you mix them 🙂
I made these for Easter and they were a huge hit! My father-in-law ate three immediately after I set them down. I had an issues with the cookies breaking when transferring from the sheet pan to the cooling rack. I ended up just taking the parchment paper off with all the cookies on it and it worked great. Highly recommend!
So glad they were a hit! Make sure the cookies cool a bit on the sheet pan before transferring, and I’d suggest using a little metal spatula like this one to help.
I added Honey Nut Cheerios instead of Corn Flakes because thats what I had on hand — came out wonderfully!
Perfect! Glad they worked out well!
A new favorite cookie!! Everyone in the house loved these! Last time I made these I was out of cornflakes so I used a combination of siete kettle potato chips and tortilla chips and it worked great! Love to keep this dough ready to go in the freezer for a last minute dessert.
So happy that you guys loved these! And those chips sound great in here – yummm 🙂
i know i’m a bit late to the party but holy cow ! these are soooo good! i didn’t have plain cornflakes so i used honey bunches of oats and picked out the clusters, then used like a tablespoon less sugar. these spread in the oven and get so caramelized! the salt on top makes them even better. everyone i shared with loved them. i also loved how quick they were to make 🙂
Woohooo!! So glad you tried them and that the Honey Bunches of Oats worked well in here. I bet that’d be delish! 🙂
THESE ARE SO GOOD. OMG. We added chocolate chips to half the batch and loved those too!
Ooh yummy!!
These are heavenly! The most amazing cookies and they are always a hit.
Never making cookies without brown butter again! I did omit the corn flakes and replaced with 1/4 cup flour. My cookies were done in exactly 10 minutes. I halved the batch and did half butterscotch chips, half semi-sweet chocolate. Both are incredible! The sea salt on top is a MUST, it adds the perfect accent to these sweet cookies. Thanks for the recipe!
Made these as part of this year’s holiday cookie exchange with some friends and they turned out great! Absolutely love the brown butter with butterscotch combined with cornflakes and oats for texture and then the salt on top (I only had kosher which worked fine but next time I wanna get fancier flaky sea salt) just made it extra amazing. Definitely adding this to my go-to cookie recipes.
Love that! This is one of our all-time favs, too 🙂
I went on a hunt to find the delicious cookie from Beatrix and found this recipe. It is spot on!! Thanks for testing it out and coming up with the perfect replica! Well done!
Of course! Glad you found this recipe and are loving it 🙂
I LOVE Love LOVE this blog. So creative and beutifully done. Brave Ambition Kitchen big hugs from the island of Maui
Awww thank YOU! ❤️ This seriously means so much! Glad you’re loving my recipes!
These turned out amazing and are my new go-to fall/holiday cookie. I baked mine for 8 minutes, and loved the texture of the oats and cornflakes. They are definite crowd pleasers!
AHH! Love these! Glad to hear you are loving these cookies and they are a hit 🙂
Have made these multiple times and they are always a hit! Perfect balance of sweet and salty, and a certified cookie bake-off winner 🙂
I really didn’t care for the added texture of the corn flakes. My cookies also spread quite a lot, but I think I made them bigger than needed. I don’t know, I am usually a fan of all things browned butter and butterscotch but these cookies didn’t really do it for me.
Sorry to hear that Laura! Try using butterscotch chips in my famous brown butter chocolate chip cookies!