I absolutely love Brown-eyed Baker‘s Salted Chocolate Shortbread cookies. To death. So I decided to play around with them for my family’s Christmas dinner this year. Results were deliciously mixed. My mom can’t have regular chocolate, so I adapted the recipe to make a vanilla bean white chocolate version. I also upped the chocolate level of the original version by adding some semisweet chocolate to the mix.

A note on dechocolating (un-chocolate-ifying?) the recipe: because cocoa powder is alkaline, simply omitting it can mess with the integrity of the recipe a bit more than you want to. I added an extra half teaspoon of baking powder to the mix to help compensate, although in the future I might do baking soda instead. Play around with it.

The Process

These require a metric crapload of butter, which is the not-so-secret to delicious cookies. Here is my butter, softening.

Cream together butter and sugars, and once creamy, add egg. Blend until combined. If you’re going the vanilla bean route, now is the time to slice open that magical bean and scrape out the delicious, wonderful caviar that is vanilla bean seeds. A quick how-to aside: use a paring knife to slit the bean open length-wise along one side, and fold open like a sticky little book.

Use a spoon to scrape out some of the black gold. MMMMMMMMM. Save the bean husk (?), it still has plenty of flavor and can be used to make vanilla sugar, vanilla extract….or whatever madcap infusion of vanilla-infused edible you want to dream up. Put it in a bag of coffee beans, maybe? I’m just spitballing here.

If you’re not going the vanilla route, simply press on to the flour-mixture step, where you have adequately fortified your flour mixture with a healthy dose of cocoa powder. Blend on, man.

Last step for the chocoholics out there: fold in some roughly chopped chocolate chips. In baking, folding simply means dumping the enfolded ingredient into the dough, then using a spatula to scoop dough up and over the ingredient, until said ingredient has been roughly incorporated into the dough. Don’t over-do.

With the inclusion of the egg, chilling is probably not entirely necessary, but I found that it helped a lot with preventing the dough from spreading too much during the baking process. So assemble your dough(s) into a log, and wrap tightly in wax paper.

Let your giant cookie dough joints chill in the fridge for a while, then slice them up into a 1-inch discs immediately before baking. Note to future-self: Do not set cookie sheet on top of preheated oven while assembling cookie dough. They will not hold their shape at all. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything. Cough cough.

Sprinkle with sea salt for the chocolate ones, or drizzle with white chocolate for the vanilla bean ones. Or you know what? Drizzle chocolate on the chocolate ones and sea salt on the vanilla ones. The world is your chocolate oyster.

The Recipes

Chocolate Not-So-Shortbread Cookies

1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons (11 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup light brown sugar
¼ granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped

Vanilla Bean Not-So-Shortbread Cookies

1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons (11 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup light brown sugar
¼ granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup white chocolate chips, for drizzling
1 inch section of vanilla bean, scraped (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)