Can you create brown butter directly from heavy cream?
Yes, this is a brown butter. You can use it in pretty much all applications which call for standard-made brown butter.
In the traditional process, first almost all of the water is removed from the cream, along with a large part of the nonfat milk solids. This gives you butter, in which the butterfat is emulsified with a small amount of water, and the remaining milk solids are dispersed. When you heat it, the water evaporates, and the solids undergo browning processes (caramelization, probably some Maillard for the proteins).
In your case, you are simply skipping the mechanical removal of the water. Instead, you are evaporating all water by heat. No milk solids are removed - from my point of view, this is an advantage, as you now have more stuff that goes tasty while browning.
You can certainly use this in cookies. As for the question of the taste being &quot;overpowering&quot;, this is up to your subjective taste. If you don't like it, you can switch back to more standard browned butter, or mix this one with normal butter, ghee, or some other solid fat.