Cooke Butter-Glazed Shortbread Cookies

Cookie Butter Shortbread Sandwich Cookies  - made dough October 25, 2014, recipe adapted from Baking with Melissa

Much as I love shortbread, I’m honest enough to admit that it’s mostly butter with some sugar and flour clinging to it. Really good shortbread makes this obvious but it also makes you not care about that. I try to only have shortbread in moderation which means making them small. Which is what I did with this recipe. What I love about making shortbread cookies is the ingredients list is usually short and simple and it gives me a chance to use vanilla bean paste so I can see those little flecks of vanilla bean scrapings in the pale shortbread dough and subsequent cookies.

When I made these, I thought I would bake them “as is” and have cute little shortbread cookies, similar to the picture in the original blog where I found the recipe. Then I got hit with the inspiration to make them as shortbread sandwiches with cookie butter filling. I’ve been having a re-discovered love affair with cookie butter again and looking for any excuse to eat it that didn’t involve my sticking a spoon inside the jar and licking it.

The plain, unglazed version

First I tried the shortbread cookie “plain” and thought it was good. Then I spread some cookie butter on one and thought it was excellent. By itself, you can taste the buttery goodness of the shortbread. With the cookie butter, the shortbread moves from being the star to Best Supporting Actor. Which is still pretty good. The only thing that didn’t make this ideal for a cookie sandwich is the cookie dough balls don’t spread so they remained rounded cookies. Which is fine – and even cute - if you’re serving them plain so they’re like little butter buttons but if you’re sandwiching them, the thickness of two chubby rounded cookies, no matter how small, is still a slightly thicker cookie than you’d normally probably want to bite into. By the time I had the idea of making cookie butter shortbread sandwiches, I had already portioned out the dough and frozen them so it was too late to try and flatten them before baking unless I wanted to thaw the dough first. Which I didn’t. So, instead of making cookie sandwiches with them, I melted some cookie butter for 10 seconds in the microwave (no longer than 10 seconds) and dipped the rounded tops of the cookies to glaze them with cookie butter instead. Voila, problem solved.

2 cups butter, softened

1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract 4 cups all-purpose flour
Biscoff spread or Speculoos cookie butter

1. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. 
2. Stir in vanilla; add flour and mix well.
3. Scoop cookies with a small cookie scoop and form into small, thick discs. Freeze overnight. 
4. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees F. 
5. Bake for 10-12 minutes depending on the size of the cookie. 
6. Let cookies cool completely then spread a thin (or thick) layer of cookie butter on half of the cookies and sandwich with the rest of the cookies.