Peanut butter and jelly shortbread bars

A recent potluck had the theme of "school lunches," and I decided to riff on peanut butter and jelly. I knew I wanted to do shortbread because shortbread is delicious. After poking around a bit, I found two recipes that I wanted to hybridize: blackberry jam shortbread bars from Stuck on Sweet and peanut butter chocolate chip shortbread from the View from the Great Island, which I made a few years ago. I substituted peanut butter for some of the butter in the shortbread bars and cut the sugar to make the ratio a little more like the peanut butter chocolate chip shortbread.

I think this recipe turned out pretty well. I personally wouldn't have minded a little less jelly for the filling and a little more peanut butter in the shortbread.

Peanut butter and jelly shortbread bars

2 sticks of butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (I used one with peanuts as the only ingredient; you may want to adjust sugar and salt if you use one with sugar and/or salt)
generous pinch of salt (or more if you like)
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup almond meal
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups seedless raspberry jam or other jam/jelly of your choice

Make the shortbread: Cream butter and sugar in a mixer or by hand. Add the peanut butter, salt, and vanilla extract and mix until combined and a bit fluffy. While mixing slowly, add the almond meal and flour in small batches. Separate into two roughly equal halves. Press one half into a greased 9x13-inch baking pan. Save the other half in the fridge. (Note: my dough didn't come together the way shortbread dough usually does, but because I was just pressing it into the pan, it was fine. I think if I had used less flour, it would have, so if you want to make these into regular cookies, you may want to reduce the flour.)
Bake shortbread at 325 for about 20 minutes or until edges are a bit brown. Remove from oven and spread jam over shortbread as evenly as possible. Sprinkle remaining dough over the top. Put back in the oven and bake until topping is browned, about 30 minutes. Cut into bars once it's cooled.

Double Coconut Shortbread

I made Smitten Kitchen's toasted coconut shortbread cookies last year, and I wondered whether coconut oil, another solid-at-room-temperature fat, could replace butter. I finally got around to trying it, and the result was delicious but delicate. The coconut oil gives them a really tender, melty mouthfeel and an incredibly deep coconut flavor.

Both the dough and the finished cookies were quite a bit more fragile than shortbread made with butter. I rolled the dough into a log before refrigerating rather than rolling out and cutting with cookie cutters as in SK's recipe. The dough was much more prone to shattering when I cut it off the log than regular shortbread is. I couldn't cut the cookies as thinly as I normally do for shortbread, which combined with the richness of coconut oil means you really just want one or two at a time, not seven. Whether that's a problem or a benefit is unclear.

After baking, the cookies were very liable to crumble completely, and I'm just eating them off of the cooling rack because they're too delicate to transfer. I'm guessing that there is some mixture of butter and coconut oil that will have the perfect combination of durability and tastiness. If you're in need of a vegan shortbread recipe, this is it. If not, you should try mixing butter and coconut oil for optimal durability.

Double coconut shortbread (adapted from here)

3/4 cup coconut oil, room temperature (or mixture of butter and coconut oil)

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

generous pinch of salt

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup shredded coconut, toasted (the really small kind, about the size of breadcrumbs, not the big flakes)

In an electric mixer, mix together the coconut oil and sugar. Add the vanilla and salt and mix. Mix in the flour and then the coconut until it kind of forms a dough. I had to turn it out onto a cutting board and use my hands to get it to come together all the way. Roll into a log and refrigerate until hard.

Cut cookies onto a pizza stone or cookie sheet. Try to get them as thin as possible without the dough shattering, which for me was between 3/8 and 1/2 inch.

Bake at 325 F for 15-20 minutes or until they look like cookies instead of dough. They won't brown as much as cookies made with butter, in my limited experience, so the usual "golden" cookie instructions don't apply.

Nutella Cookies

I pinned this recipe a while ago. It's not hard to see the appeal of Nutella cookies. The pin I pinned actually didn't link to the right recipe, so I searched online. Basically the same recipe popped up all over the internet, but I used the one from Kirbie's cravings. I added some chopped hazelnuts to about half the batter, and both Jon and I thought they improved the cookies. So in the future, we'll be including them. The Nutella flavor is subtle but definitely present. I think Frangelico would be a good addition to pump up the hazelnut flavor even more.

Nutella cookies

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup white sugar

1/2 cup Nutella

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/3 cup chopped hazelnuts

Preheat oven to 350 F. Cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Mix in Nutella, egg, and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl and slowly add to the wet ingredients. Mix until just combined. Stir in hazelnuts.

Drop by heaping spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet or pizza stone. Cook for 10-15 minutes, or until the tops of the cookies are starting to crackle a little.

Three short breads

I may have mentioned that I'm on a shortbread kick. I'd like to get more comfortable with shortbread ratios so I can start creating my own. Back in February, I made the rosemary pine nut shortbread from 101cookbooks. It was great! The rosemary, lemon, and pine nut flavors all had a chance to sing out, and the texture was crisp and light. It will definitely be made again. I liked it better than the Earl Grey shortbread we've made before, but Earl Grey is still Jon's favorite.

A few days ago, I made two shortbread recipes from The View from the Great Island: peanut butter chocolate chip and double dark chocolate. Both were really good, but they weren't as good in cooked form as raw. Of course, not cooking the dough is easier than cooking it, but it felt kind of naughty to eat raw shortbread dough, despite its lack of raw eggs. These recipes had a higher butter to flour ratio than other shortbreads I've made, and I think it made the cooked texture a little too crumbly. The peanut butter one almost seemed like eating straight peanut butter in the way it stuck to the roof of my mouth. I don't know if I'll make these again. Jon suggests making the dough as "summer cookies" that we can just cut off the log and eat without baking.

Storing my cookie cutters

A friend on facebook mentioned that her mom had their cookie cutter collection hanging on their wall when she was growing up. I decided that would be a fun thing to do with my cookie cutters too. I have a few embroidery hoops lying around from when I used to screen print, so I used one as a frame. I might get super-fancy and paint it later.

This is what it looks like with the rest of the stuff on our kitchen wall:

Those are a poster of exotic fruits and vegetables in Danish and some French food postcards that I taped to a piece of poster board. I'm very pleased with the food-related decorations.

Earl Grey shortbread cookies

This is my second time making this recipe for Earl Grey shortbread cookies. The tea flavor is subtle but nice. I have never been a fan of shortbread cookies, but having a little extra flavor is nice, and I find them much tastier homemade than store-bought. The second time I made them, I changed up the method just a little both to account for the fact that I have a mixer but not a food processor and to make them rolled cookies instead of a log that would then be sliced. The rolling process was pretty time-intensive. I don't know if shortbread is meant to be rolled out, and it was kind of sticking to both the cutting board and the rolling pin. Flouring the pin didn't seem to help, so I'm not quite sure what the best way to deal with that would be, besides just being patient.

I didn't mind taking the time to roll them out since I just got a bunch of cute cookie cutters, as you can see in the above picture. I'm not sure what all of them are. There's definitely a dog, but there's also another one that's either a dog or a sheep. There is a hippo, too. That's nice. The one in the top left is either a foot or a bird that's sitting down. I kind of think it's a foot, so maybe it goes with the shark and umbrella as kind of a beach-themed set.

Earl Grey shortbread cookies

2 tbsp loose-leaf Earl Grey tea

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature

3/4 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

In a coffee grinder or small food processor, grind the tea until it's not powdered but a bit more broken up than it started. Mix tea, flour, and salt together in a medium bowl and set aside.

Using a mixer or wooden spoon, cream the butter, sugar, and vanilla. Add the flour mixture and stir to combine. Refrigerate until ready to roll out and cut into fun shapes. (Alternatively, you can follow the original recipe's suggestion that you roll the dough into a log, wrap in saran wrap, refrigerate, and cut into discs.)

Bake at 375 for 12 minutes, or until turning golden brown. Allow to cool on the baking sheet a few minutes before transferring to cooling racks.

"Healthy" oatmeal-chocolate chip-pecan-dried cherry cookies

I got this recipe from my mom. One of my aunts lives in Michigan and sends us big bags of dried Michigan cherries every year. They're nice and tart, great in oatmeal, granola, and these cookies. They're also good eaten right out of your hand, which is how we eat a lot of them. I call the recipe healthy because it has whole-wheat flour, not much sugar, whole oats, dried fruit, and nuts. It also has two sticks of butter, hence the quotation marks. It's sure tasty, and it must be healthier than cookies with a ton of butter and none of the good stuff. At least that's what I tell myself. The batter has so many "goodies" that it barely sticks together. Consequently, you don't have to cook it for very long. As you might be able to tell from the picture, I just barely burned the first batch.

"Healthy" oatmeal-chocolate chip-pecan-dried cherry cookies

1 cup butter, softened (two sticks)
1 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 tbsp milk
4 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups oats (I use old-fashioned, but quick-cook and instant are fine too)
12 oz chocolate chips or chunks
1 cup chopped toasted pecans or walnuts
1 cup dried cherries or raisins

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the wet ingredients and mix thoroughly. Add the flour, baking soda, and cocoa powder and mix thoroughly. Add the oats, chocolate chips, nuts, and cherries or raisins and combine. Bake at 350 F for 8-10 minutes. They will continue to cook a little when you take them out of the oven, so err on the side of undercooked.