Chocolate Shortbread

  
I love shortbread and I love chocolate, but I have had trouble finding a good chocolate shortbread recipe.  The best I have been able to do is dip plain shortbread in chocolate, but that just isn't the same.  Well, I may have solved my problem.  These are incredible chocolate shortbread cookies!  They are from Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook.  These are very nice as far as shortbread cookies go.  They are a good thickness, a good texture (perhaps a little softer and less crumbly in the middle than I would like, but that may be the recipe or may be that my oven is acting up...again!), and they have lots of sugar on top.  In other words, they, to me, fit the specs the ideal shortbread cookie.  But what about the taste?  (After all, to be good they can't just have the right texture, they must also have the right taste.) Well, to put it briefly, the taste is very nice.  To be a little more verbose about it: they are buttery, chocolaty, a bit cinnamon-y, and sugary (not that they are sweet, I'm just talking about the sugar on top).

What is wonderful about these is that they use unsweetened cocoa (which keeps them from getting too sweet), cinnamon (which gives a nice dimension to the flavors and, as I've said before, I love cinnamon), and superfine sugar (which makes the texture smoother) in the dough.  Also good, the granulated sugar on top is sprinkled on just after they are sliced (which is right when the cookies come out of the oven) so it looks perfectly white and sparkly, but still stays on.

P.S. I'll post a picture tomorrow, I promise.  It's a bit late now and I have class tomorrow morning, so I don't really think it's the best time to be fiddling with uploading photos to my computer and then to the blog.

P.S.S. Tomorrow (or sometime later this week) I'll post an old batch of chocolate shortbread cookies I made well before I started this blog.  It wasn't nearly as good as far as shortbread goes, but I did quite like them as just a cookie!