How to Make DoubleTree Cookies with Protein Powder

Recently, DoubleTree by Hilton released the recipe for their infamous chocolate chip cookies. If you’ve never had a DoubleTree cookie, now you can make them at home without making a special trip to spend a night in one of their hotels. We made a batch shortly after the recipe’s release, and they’re spot on!

Since I’ve been on a copycat recipe as of late, making Domino’s cinnamon bread twists and garlic parmesan bread twists, it only felt right to put a kinda healthy spin on the DoubleTree cookies. Thanks to some sugar substitutes and a bit of protein powder, I was able to cut the calories of each cookie in half and the carbs by roughly two thirds!

DoubleTree Cookies Recipe Walkthrough

I’ll run you through a visual recipe tutorial below so you can get an idea of what to look for in each step. You’ll also find more detailed notes on ingredients in the post. So if you skip down to the recipe card and have an ingredient question, jump back up to the post.

Now, let’s bake!

Cream butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar together in a stand mixer or food processor.

If you have a stand mixer, this recipe will be a breeze. You can also use a food processor or hand mixer in place of the stand mixer. Or worst case, you can even cream the butter and sugar by hand using a fork or whisk. It might take a little elbow grease, though!

As for ingredients in this step, the recipe calls for the real deal, full fat salted butter. Unlike my chocolate chip protein cookies that use light butter, I found these cookies got a little spongy without the real deal. I didn’t, however, try half light butter and half real butter. So you may want to experiment if you need lower fat cookies.

For the granulated sugar and brown sugar, I used Swerve which is a zero-calorie, erythritol-based sugar substitute. It tastes and measures 1:1 for sugar, and it caramelizes almost as good as the real deal so you get the crispy edges and soft center. If you want to use another sweetener, make sure it measures 1:1 for both granulated and brown sugar.

Add an egg, vanilla extract, and a splash of lemon juice.

This step is simple enough. Such a tiny amount of lemon juice may seem odd, but that’s what the original DoubleTree cookies recipe calls for! I’m sure it does some sciency stuff with the baking soda. Ya know, acids and bases and all that stuff.

Add rolled oats, all purpose flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, and protein powder.

Aside from the sugar substitutes, the other star of the calorie show for these cookies is protein powder. Taking the place of roughly half the all purpose flour in the original DoubleTree cookies adds reduces the carbs by nearly 50 grams.

This recipe, like all my protein powder recipes, calls for PEScience Select. This is a whey and casein blend which means it’s a bit thicker in consistency than whey-only protein powders. I always like to mention that substituting different protein powders in dough recipes is very tricky. So substitute at your own risk!

Side note: You can order small samples of PEScience if you’re new to baking with protein powder and want to do a test run. If you like it, you can use my affiliate discount code mason to save 15% off PEScience products. If you’re looking for other recipes to try with a sample pack, try my protein sugar cookies, coffee cake protein muffins, or chicken and protein waffles.

Fold in walnuts and chocolate chips.

The original DoubleTree cookies recipe calls for a HUGE amount of chocolate chips. So I scaled that back a bit to save some carbs and calories. I also used larger dark chocolate chips. You could use smaller semi-sweet chocolate chips and probably scale back even more.

As for the walnuts, I think the amount used is perfect. You get some walnut in nearly every bite, and it makes the cinnamon, chocolate, and buttery goodness really pop.

Portion the dough into 15 balls and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

If you follow the recipe as written, you should be able to handle the cookie dough. Though the original recipe calls for using a scoop to portion out the cookies. So if you make some minor changes and notice the dough isn’t nice and neat, you can still use a spoon or scoop to transfer to a baking sheet.

And since it’s pictured here, get and use a food scale! I use a KD-8000 from MyWeight and haven’t touched a measuring cup in years.

Bake at 300ºF for 20-23 minutes or until the cookies are golden brown around the edges and slightly soft in the center. 

The original DoubleTree cookies recipe notes you should let the cookies cool for an hour. They’re meant to be a little soft in the center so don’t over bake them!

Final DoubleTree Cookie Recipe Notes

In addition to ingredient modifications, I scaled the recipe down to make one batch of cookies. The original recipe makes a massive batch of cookie dough and includes notes on freezing the dough. I’m betting you could freeze this dough and bake straight from frozen as well, but I haven’t tested it.

Their instructions are to go straight from the freezer to a baking sheet and use the same temperature with an extended bake time. We tested the original recipe and found a batch of 8 cookies took around 30 minutes at 300ºF.

For an interesting alternative cook method, check out our Traeger smoked chocolate chip cookies. You can smoke the walnuts ahead of making the dough, and that’s as tasty as it sounds.

Okay, I think that covers it. If you have a recipe question, drop a comment at the bottom of the post. And if you make a modification, I’d love to hear about it!