Chocolate Shortbread

These chocolate shortbread cookies are extra delicious if you’re a chocolate lover. They’re made with black cocoa for an ultra-rich chocolate shortbread cookie, and then they’re stuffed with dark chocolate chunks.

Hello, tall glass of milk! Meet your new best friend.

What you’re going to love about this recipe

• The chocolate cookie dough is rich dark chocolate with the deep dark flavor of an oreo cookie and the shortbread’s buttery texture.
• You can mix in chocolate chips or chunks if you want, or you can bake this up without any mix-ins.
• The cookie dough freezes well, so you don’t have to bake a huge batch. You can freeze the dough and have cookies on demand all year long.

What you’ll need

• Unsalted Butter. Use European-style unsalted butter, which has more butterfat content than American butter.
• Sugar. Granulated sugar. Superfine sugar is a good choice here because it melts into the butter more quickly.
• Salt. Always use Kosher or fine sea salt for baking.
• Egg yolks. Egg yolks help to refine this dough and give it a more tender crumb.
• Vanilla.
• All-purpose flour.
• Cocoa powder. Cocoa powder will replace some of the flour that would be in a traditional shortbread cookie. Use whatever cocoa powder you like. I’ve chosen dutch process or alkalized darker cocoa powder. The flavor is similar to Oreos.

First of all: Why Are They Called Shortbread?

Shortbread or a short dough is a dough that gets its name from the interaction that the high butter ratio has on the flour’s gluten proteins.

The high amount of butter in this dough prevents gluten from forming long bonds, as you might see in bread, and keeps the crumb tight and “short.”

The result is a crispy, crumbly dough. This butter-to-flour ratio makes a shortbread cookie so delicious.

The butter heats up and lightly toasts the flour and sugar during baking, giving it a buttery, savory flavor with just a hint of sweetness. The flour merely holds all of the butterfat molecules in place, so they don’t run off the baking sheet.

Good job, butter and flour! 🏆

Which Cocoa Powder?

Chocolate shortbread involves replacing some of the flour in traditional butter shortbread with cocoa powder. This shortbread cookie recipe calls for dark or black cocoa powder. However, you can substitute any unsweetened cocoa powder.

Cocoa powder has a different chemical composition than flour. You may not realize how much flavor variety there is in cocoa powders.

You’re probably familiar with Hershey’s Unsweetened Cocoa Powder. Hershey’s is a pretty standard and super easy-to-find cocoa powder, and Hershey’s cocoa has a well-rounded flavor and is suitable for most baking applications.

Hershey’s also has a Special Dark variety of double-processed cocoa powder, yielding, and darker flavor. It’s more like the flavor that you know from an Oreo cookie.

My favorite Cocoa Powders

• Sharfenberger
• Guittard
• Ghiradelli
• Valrhona
• Weirdo Good Black Velvet
• King Arthur Flour Black Cocoa

I encourage you to try different cocoa powders and find your signature chocolate shortbread cookies.

Using a different cocoa powder than most people are used to tasting gives your cookies that extra special something that leaves everyone wondering what you did to get that unique flavor!

Let’s Get Baking

1. Set all of your ingredients out, make sure the butter and flour are at room temperature.
2. Start by sifting together the dry ingredients. I usually add my dry ingredients to a medium bowl and then give them a quick stir with a whisk.
3. Add the butter to your stand mixer, fixed with a paddle attachment, and cream the butter until it is creamy and the sugar is dissolved into it.
4. Add the sugar. Beat until light in color for about 3 minutes.
5. Add the egg and the vanilla. Beat again
6. Scrape down the sides and beat one more time.
7. Add all of the dry mixture in at once.
8. Turn the mixer on low. Beat very slowly until the mixture becomes crumbly.
9. Scrape all of the mixtures onto the countertop and then press it together.
10. Divide the dough into four equal portions and make four eight-inch logs. The logs can be round or rectangular.
11. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least four hours and up to overnight.

When You’re Ready to Bake

This chocolate shortbread recipe is easy to slice and bake. If you have more cookie dough than you want to bake you can freeze it for several months, or even longer.

1. Preheat the oven to 350℉.
2. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
3. Slice each log of cookie dough into approximately 12 slices. They will be a little bit fatter than a quarter inch.
4. Bake the cookies for 14 to 18 minutes. Watch closely as oven temperatures vary.

Frequently Asked Questions

Hungry for more cookie recipes?

• Persimmon Cookies
• The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
• Pecan Shortbread Cookies
• Molasses Sugar Cookies
• Milk Bar’s Compost Cookies
• Homemade Oreos
• Parmesan Shortbread
• Shortbread Dipped in Chocolate

A few of our favorite chocolate recipes

If you’re a chocolate lover, here are a few of our favorite chocolate recipes for you to try.

• Chocolate Mocha Cake
• Chocolate Mousse
• Chocolate Pot de Creme