Salted Butter and Chocolate Chunk Shortbread, or Why Would I Make Another Chocolate Chip Cookie Ever Again? by Alison Roman

(^That right there, folks, is the longest recipe title known to humankind.)

Everyone has an opinion on what makes for the best chocolate chip cookie. Be it chewiness, sweetness, saltiness, thickness, thinness, just out of the oven or next-day. I believe every human has the inalienable right to personal cookie preferences, so I won’t claim a universally accepted premiere chocolate chip cookie quality. However, I will tell you what I think makes the best chocolate chip cookie: a balanced ratio of sugar to salt. A cookie without salt is simply uninteresting to me. 

Because of this, I have a predisposition to not only love Alison’s shortbread chocolate chunk cookie, but to echo her question: why would I make another kind again? (My answer is: I’d make a different kind if I find myself craving a more layered, soft, but dense version of said cookie. But the shortbread will scratch the itch 9/10 times.) 

These cookies take some planning, requiring at least 2 hours of chill time in the fridge. The dough assembly, if you have a stand mixer to do the heavy-lifting, is easy. It starts with beating two and a quarter stick of butter with sugar until light and fluffy. Then slowly adding the flour and salt (if you use unsalted butter) and chocolate chunks (I chopped mine from some Whole Foods branded dark chocolate bars) until they’re all combined. I divided the dough onto two sheets of plastic wrap, and rolled them into logs that are 2.25 inches thick. Oftentimes, I wing this sort of thing. But when it comes to thinly sliced cookie dough, the last thing you want is for them to fall apart. It felt important to be exact in the circumference measurements for this reason. 

I prepared my dough on a Saturday afternoon, just before leaving for a party called The Great Midwestern Cornhole Tournament. And yes, it was exactly like it sounds. Great, full of midwestern experiences like college football, beer, and friendly people, and there was a verifiable cornhole tournament. Jordan and I placed 8th out of 16 teams, for those wondering. We’ll take it. 

On Sunday I was ready to bake. I took out one log at a time -- painting it with egg and rolling it in Turbinado sugar, then slicing it into rounds and topping the cookies with flaky sea salt. The baking time averaged to 16 minutes for me. 

I’ve had plenty of shortbread cookies in the past, but what makes these stand out is the crunchy sugar on the edges. I brought the cookies to work on Monday, and by 2pm, they were all gone. The most frequent comment I heard, besides “those cookies were amazing,” was “the sugar on the edges - oh my!”  

145 recipes cooked, 80 to go.

Tiny, Salty, Chocolatey Cookies by Alison Roman

It is on a rare day that I crave chocolate. Generally speaking, I’m a savory gal. If I must have something sweet, I dream of strawberry pie or tangy lemon bars. It sounds like Alison and I are in agreement on this. But every once in a while, we have a hankering for a small morsel, literally just a taste of chocolate, preferably dark chocolate. And it is for this instance that these cookies were created. 

Seldom though they are, my chocolate cravings tend to come on strongly and usually at night. One minute I’m relaxing on the couch, and the next I’m on my feet urgently searching the refrigerator’s bottom shelf for the Trader Joe's Pound Plus bar I keep in the back. These cravings don’t mess around. Which is why these cookies may be my solution. They take less than an hour to assemble and bake. 

Plus, they’re tiny, (which makes them dangerously snackable), and unintentionally gluten free. Ingredients only include cocoa powder, sugar, eggs, brown butter, and chocolate. Alison gives an option for chopped nuts, but I say no nuts, keep it simple.

One confounding aspect of this recipe is the quantity it yields. Alison tells you to “drop quarter-sized blobs of dough” onto the baking sheet. To make sure I achieved the right size, I dug out a quarter from my wallet and laid it on the counter to reference. I’ve never been great at size approximations. She says this should make 24 cookies. But using a quarter as my guide, my dough produced not 24, but 44 cookies! It took four rounds of baking to get them all in and out of the oven. I’m not complaining, more cookies is always better than less. I just kept wondering when this fishes and loaves situation would run out. 

These tiny cookies are a real treat, no matter how often you crave chocolate.

26 recipes cooked, 199 to go.