Almost-soft shortbread cookies with compost-cookie like mix-ins.
Calories: 110kcal
Ingredients
2sticks unsalted butter
½cuplight brown sugar
2.5cupswhite whole wheat flouror all-purpose
2cupspecansground into flour
2.5teaspoonsvanilla
¼teaspoonflaky sea salt
1.5cupsmix-ins: potato chipspretzel thins, cornflakes, marshmallows, chopped bittersweet chocolate, etc.
milkas needed
Instructions
_Make the dough:_In a large saucepan, brown the butter. Add the sugar through salt and stir until a smooth dough forms. Fold in your mix-ins and stir until evenly incorporated. Add a tablespoon or three of milk if the batter is too dry to hold together. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and freeze for 20 minutes.
Shape and bake: Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
When I need to make a specific number of cookies, I’ll divide the dough into chunks and designate each chunk for a certain number of cookies. For this batch, I divided the mass of dough into three balls. From there, I divided each third of dough into two, and then two again. So each little ball of dough needed to make three cookies to equal 36 cookies total.
If you don’t like dough division, I’d recommend using a tablespoon to measure out scant tablespoons of dough for each cookie. Because I stuffed so many mix-ins to the dough, this dough was on the dry side and extremely prone to cracking, so each cookie took a bit of coaxing to make a smooth shape. These will hardly spread, so I flattened each ball of dough to about 1/2-inch thickness and then molded the edges with my fingers until they smoothed out.
Place on a cookie sheet about two inches apart—again, they won’t spread, so you could theoretically put them closer together. Bake for 18-20 minutes or until edges are browned and the tops aren’t squishy-soft. You should easily be able to pry one off the sheet with a spatula.