After baking lots of chewy, gooey things recently, I started dreaming about buttery, melt-in-your-mouth shortbread.
Chocolate chip shortbread, to be exact.
I’m not sure why (Weird. I know).
Anyway. So when I stumbled upon (literally) this, I went straight into the kitchen and made it.
I did something ridiculously good to this shortbread.
I divided the dough into two and added chopped up hazelnut milk chocolate to half of it (instead of the dark chocolate chips that went into the other half).
This was an accident. My mum won’t eat anything with dark chocolate in it and I didn’t have any milk choc chips. A block of hazelnut milk chocolate was all I had. So I chopped it up. Threw it in.
And boy am I glad I didn’t have any plain chocolate.
The milk chocolate and the coffee shortbread and the tiny hazelnut chunks all together? Very, very, very good. It all just goes together.
SHORTBREAD
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan, via Use Real Butter.
1 tbsp instant coffee
1 tbsp boiling water
230g unsalted butter, softened (8 oz)
2/3 cup icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups plain flour
3/4 cup chopped chocolate/chocolate chips (120g, 4 oz)
Dissolve the coffee in the boiling water and set aside to cool.
Using an electric mixer, beat the butter and icing sugar together for about 3 minutes, until completely smooth. Add the vanilla and coffee and beat until just combined (at this point, you basically have coffee buttercream if you’d like to frost something!).
Reduce the mixer speed to low and add the flour. Mix until incorporated. Add the chopped chocolate/chocolate chips and mix until evenly dispersed.
I ate a lot of dough at this point.
Using a rubber spatula, scoop the dough into a gallon snap-lock bag (that’s the big one. I didn’t have one so I divided the dough in half and used two small sandwich-size ones).
Leaving the top open, use a rolling pin to roll the dough so it evenly fills the bag (or bags). Seal the bag and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or up to two days.
(If you don’t have snap-lock bags at all, you can just roll the dough out between two sheets of baking paper until its 3/4cm (1/4 inch) thick and cover with plastic wrap when you refrigerate. The bag idea makes life really easy though).
One you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 170 C and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
Place your dough, in its bag, on a chopping board. Slit it open on all sides and remove the top plastic.
Leaving the dough on the bottom half of the plastic bag, use a ruler to cut it into 4cm (1 1/2 inch) squares.
Place the shortbread squares on the baking trays and bake for 18-20 minutes. They will still be pale.
Allow to cool before eating them all. Makes 32 shortbread cookies.
The dark chocolate version were great too. In the end, I couldn’t decide which I preferred.
