Don’t give up!  I have something for you!  It’s buttery, it’s tender, it’s chocolatey, it’s chocolate shortbread!

You’ll be able to raid your pantry and whip up this super easy chocolate shortbread recipe before you can even blink.  I loved this shortbread so much, that I am going to make it again, and instead of using icing sugar on top, I may drizzle some chocolate on top.

This shortbread tasted lovely with my coffee, lovely for dessert, lovely for afternoon tea.  It’s just lovely all around.  The recipe asked that it be baked in a rectangular pan, but I baked it in a round tart pan with fluted edges.  I had to bake it for a longer time.

When testing for doneness, the recipe states that the shortbread will be firm to touch.  This is crucial, or you may end up with dry shortbread.  Touch in the middle, lightly, and if you can push it down easily, bake for a couple minutes longer until it is firm, then take it out immediately.

So next time you think that you don’t have the right ingredients to make something delicious, remember this recipe and give it a go.

Chocolate Shortbread
Adapted from Valli Little
Makes 12 slices

Ingredients
300g unsalted butter
1 cup (220g) caster sugar
2 1/2 cups (375g) plain flour
5 tablespoons good-quality cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
Icing sugar, to dust

Method
Grease and line base and sides of a 18cm x 28cm lamington pan. Beat butter and sugar in a bowl with electric beaters until pale. Sift in flour, cocoa and soda and beat slowly until just combined. Spread in pan and smooth with a spatula. Prick all over with a fork. Chill for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 180°C. Cook shortbread for 25 minutes or until firm to touch. While it’s still hot, use a knife to score it into 12 rectangles. Cool slightly, then remove from pan and cut into 12 pieces. Dust with icing sugar before serving. Shortbread will keep for 3-4 days in an airtight container.

However, while my daughter was at preschool last week, I decided to enlist the help of my 2-year-old son to help me make an interesting-looking recipe on the back of a bag of dried apricots. The recipe was for chocolate and apricot chip cookies; like a chocolate chip cookie with chopped dried apricots.

And do you know what?  Blake did an amazing job with helping me.  To be honest, this was the first time I let my son help me bake.  He’s generally a tornado and destroys everything in sight, from toys to books, from CD and DVD cases to kitchen cabinets, you name it, so I thought that if there was any child I would not allow in the kitchen to help me bake, it would be this boy.  But I felt extra patient that day and decided to give it a go.

He was more than happy to help.  I measured out the ingredients, and he poured them into the bowl as needed.  He stirred the flour into the dough and mixed in the chocolate chips and apricots.  He was so proud.

His cookies were really nice.  They were sort of cakey and chewy, definitely not crunchy.  The apricots were an interesting addition, and one that Blake didn’t actually like that well in the end.

I bought some sea salt for my chocolate salted dulce de leche cupcakes a couple of weeks ago and since I had seen chocolate chip cookies with a sprinkling of sea salt on other blogs, I decided to try a sprinkling of it on these cookies.  It was an addition that I could have done without, although some sea salt fans might appreciate it.

They weren’t quite as good the next day and I thought they benefited from being warmed up in microwave for a few seconds.  The cookies are very easy to make and I would definitely recommend them if you’d like to try a nice variation on the chocolate chip cookie.

Chocolate And Apricot Chip Cookies
Adapted from the back of a Sunbeam Foods Turkish Apricots bag
Makes approximately 1 1/2 dozen

Ingredients
3/4 cup Sunbeam Dried Apricots, diced
100g butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk or dark choc bits

Method
Cream butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until light and creamy. Add egg and vanilla essence and beat well.

Add flour and baking powder and combine with a wooden spoon. Stir in apricots and choc bits.

Place tablespoons of mixture onto tray and press down to flatten. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 180°C.

I presume this is the same with the CUPCAKES book, but I’m not sure; I haven’t yet purchased this book.  I probably will eventually though!

But back to the COOKIES book, one of the pictures and recipes that I kept coming back to were the giant chocolate sugar cookies.  I put off making them for so long because I thought sugar cookies were supposed to be soft; the chocolate sugar cookies were supposed to be a little more sandy in texture, I believe.  I didn’t think I’d like that in a sugar cookie.

Well, after a couple of weeks without a chocolate fix, I decided to go ahead and try out the giant chocolate sugar cookies.  I’ve seen a few photos of these cookies on other blogs and they all turn out sort of different; I’ve never seen any as amazing as what is in the book, though.

The recipe gives the baker a choice between using melted shortening or melted butter as one of the ingredients.  Even though I am not shortening’s biggest fan, I chose this because I had read somewhere (can’t remember where) that shortening would produce a puffier, chewier cookie, whereas using the butter would result in a flatter, crispier cookie.  I don’t like crispy cookies, so I used the shortening.

And I absolutely loved them!  They were chewy and puffier than most of the ones I have seen on other food blogs.  They were, however, crispier on the next day.  I’m totally sorry I had put off making these for so long.  This is a recipe that I will definitely be making again whenever I need a super chocolatey fix!

This is one of those recipes in the COOKIES book that can also be found online at marthastewart.com here.

I was young, and staying with a babysitter throughout my school’s summer vacation.  I must have been around 7 or 8 years old.  One day we had went to my babysitter’s mom’s house, just down the road.  My babysitter’s mom was very elderly, but still perfectly capable of living on her own.  I don’t know if she was a busy cook or baker, or if she just had a couple good recipes that she threw together, but her chocolate chip cookies were the best I’ve ever tasted.  I think that I was allowed to have two, yet I begged for more.  They were warm from the oven, chock full of chocolate chips, the browning was perfect and they were the most perfect level of soft, chewy and gooey.  I’ve never tasted a chocolate chip cookie like that again, which is unfortunate, because you just hate to lose a good thing.  Both my babysitter and her mom have passed away and that recipe for her chocolate chip cookies has vanished.  But that’s what makes it so special now.

I’ve made so many chocolate chip cookie recipes and I always end up subconsciously comparing my batch of cookies to my babysitter’s mom’s cookies; none have been quite as good as hers, or at least not as good as I remember them being.

The browned butter of the Cook’s Illustrated perfect chocolate chip cookies, and their chewiness, make this my favorite recipe.  I have recently found my second favorite recipe, however, and it comes from a very unexpected place; the inside of a box of unsalted butter.  Land O’ Lakes butter, to be exact.

I had cut this recipe for chewy jumbo chocolate chip cookies out of the Land O’ Lakes unsalted butter box a long time ago because the recipe looked okay and I tucked it away into my recipe book; I was just reluctant to try it out because I didn’t have much hope for a recipe that came from inside a box of butter.

However, I came across a post from Cooking On The Side for this exact same recipe from Land O’ Lakes and the pictures of these cookies looked very tempting.  Kathy, like me, was originally skeptical of this particular recipe, but gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised with the outcome.  So I decided to pull out my cut-out recipe and finally try it for myself.

The two photos in this post so far show the result of this recipe.  While they don’t bring me back to the cookie I tasted nearly 25 years ago, they have earned the status of my second favorite chocolate chip cookie, and with me being so picky about my chocolate chip cookies, that’s saying a lot!  The cookies turned out crisp around the edges and chewy in the middle.

But wait, I have a related cookie (at least in that it also has chocolate chips) to share with you in this post; the monster cookie.  This is a cookie I’ve never heard of and first found at Sophistimom.  I did some searches for monster cookie recipes online, but out of all that I found, Sophistimom’s recipe was my favorite.

These cookies are fully packed with oats and peanut butter and they are jumbo!  You could eat these cookies for dinner and be stuffed full!  But wow, they are great.  Next time I make these (and there will be a next time), I might add a bit more chocolate chips, not much, but maybe a couple tablespoons more.  The dough was a little crumbly and the chocolate chips had a tendency to stick together in clumps for some reason.  These are super chewy cookies and they stayed gooey in the middle after baking.  I made half of these cookies jumbo-sized (for super quick breakfasts!), and the other half I made regular sized with a generously rounded tablespoon of dough (for deserts!).  I froze the leftover cookies and they have frozen well.

Find the recipe for Sophistimom’s monster cookies on her website.

For the recipe for chewy jumbo chocolate chip cookies from Land O’ Lakes…

Chewy Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from inside Land O Lakes unsalted butter box
Makes 26 jumbo cookies

Ingredients
4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt*
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 (12-ounce) package (2 cups) semi-sweet chocolate chunks or chocolate chips

Method
Heat oven to 375°F.

Combine flour, baking powder and baking soda in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Combine butter, sugar and brown sugar in a large bowl. Beat at medium speed, scraping the bowl often, until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. Continue beating, scraping bowl often, until well mixed. Reduce speed to low. Beat, gradually adding flour mixture, until well mixed. Stir in chocolate chunks.

Drop dough by 1/4 cupfuls, 2 inches apart, onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 10 to 14 minutes or until light golden brown. (Do not overbake.) Let stand 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from cookie sheets.

*Note that it may have been a mistake on the box that the salt was left out of the recipe; Kathy from Cooking On The Side added salt to her recipe, and if you read the recipe for these cookies on the Land O’ Lakes website you will see that salt is indeed one of the ingredients.  The recipe I posted here is from the Land O’ Lakes website, although 2 teaspoons seems like a lot of salt (I used 1 teaspoon).

A dark chocolate cookie with oats and chocolate chips!  I used Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder for these, and replaced the nuts in their recipe with semisweet chocolate chips.

These cookies are so dark!  I had a little trouble baking them, as I found that the middles stayed quite gooey, which made me want to bake them longer, but that resulted in a crunchier cookie.  They’re actually quite chewy, and very chocolatey, although they become a little crunchier anyway the next day.

Oddly enough, the kids weren’t too fond of these; they’d eat about half of a cookie and leave the rest.  That was fine with me though, it left more for the rest of us!  :)

Anyway, what did bring me out of my hiatus was Bakerella’s post about cowgirl/boy cookies.  Her cookie-mix-in-a-jar was so adorable!  I’m definitely going to be using that idea for gifts.  Her recipe for cowgirl/boy looked so easy that I decided to quickly mix up the ingredients and bake a batch while my little boy was taking a nap.

I couldn’t find the pink M&M’s that Bakerella used, but they can be bought at the M&M’s online shop.  I just used  the regular color mix of M&M’s.

These cookies were fantastic!  I thought they tasted best straight out of the oven, but even on the third day they still tasted great.  I think that this particular cookie-mix-in-a-jar would be a great gift for anyone, and I’d highly recommend that you go and make a batch of these for yourself too!  :)

The cookies came in a pack of 24.  After taste-testing one, I froze the rest of them to make them last as long as possible.  The cookies are absolutely fanastic.  They are soft and chewy, and the chocolate chunks are huge and delicious.

But with 24 of these cookies, I wanted to try to do some more creative things with them, rather than just eat them as is, one by one.  So first I made an ice cream sandwich.

Which was great, but two of those huge cookies, plus vanilla ice cream, plus mini chocolate chips was a bit too much to eat all at once!

Next, after being inspired by a post from Our Best Bites about frozen pudding pops, I made vanilla pudding pops (using half and half) with chunks of Costco’s cookies and ribbons of fudge sauce.

Okay, so that fudge sauce really didn’t work out very well!  It gets solid in the refrigerator, so I thought it would freeze up solid in the freezer, but the warm water I need to use to unmold the pops melted the fudge sauce.  Despite the horrible messy look to these pudding pops, however, they tasted amazing!

You might think that the chunks of cookie that went into these pops would freeze up too hard to bite into, but you’d be wrong.  The pudding actually kept the cookie pieces soft and easy to bite into.

My last creative adventure for Costco’s cookies was simply a chocolate chip cookie sundae.

I warmed the cookie in the microwave until it was really soft and the chunks were really gooey, scooped vanilla ice cream on top, as well as fudge sauce and a cherry.

But most of the cookies actually got eaten plain!  I had stored in them in the freezer, but let them thaw out completely to room temperature before eating them.  A quick zap in the microwave once they were at room temperature made them taste like they had just come from the oven.  My crazy daughter preferred to eat them straight from the freezer!

—

On a totally separate note, I’d like to say that I’m now 37 weeks pregnant.  I have a habit of going early with my pregnancies, so anytime from now if you notice that I haven’t posted in over 4 days it would probably be safe to assume that the baby has arrived!  I may take a brief hiatus from updating The Sweetest Kitchen for a few weeks after that, although I have a few other recipes currently waiting to be posted that I will try to go through first.  Don’t worry though, because I will return!  :)

I have a new favorite now, though.  It’s the peanut butter sandwich cookie filled with plain Nutella.

The directions are simple.  Bake your favorite peanut butter cookies (in my case I used this flourless peanut butter cookie recipe), take two of the cookies, spread plain Nutella on one cookie and top it with the other cookie.  Then eat!

These flourless peanut butter cookies are actually quite delicate, so it took some gentle spreading maneuvers with the Nutella to not break the cookie.  But these are, by far, my favorite peanut butter cookies so I had to use them!

I was majorly impressed.  It tasted just like a sugar cookie!  The only thing I did differently was divide the recipe for both the cookie and the frosting in half (because I didn’t want so much at once!) and baked it in an 8×11-inch glass baking dish.  I had to shorten the baking time, but not by much.

If you need a quick sugar cookie fix, I would highly recommend trying out this recipe for sugar cookie bars!

I decided that cookies would be easiest to travel with, so I tried Smitten Kitchen’s homemade Oreos recipe.

There has been a bit of a debate in Smitten Kitchen’s homemade Oreos comments about whether or not it is okay to use regular (not Dutch-processed) cocoa powder for these cookies.  Well, I was out of Dutch-processed cocoa and used regular unsweetened Hershey’s cocoa powder to make these.  They turned out just fine, and puffier, than the photos I have seen where people used Dutch-processed.

I thought they tasted similar to the good old Oreo cookie, but not quite.  I actually did not like the taste of the homemade Oreos dunked in milk, but I love the store-bought Oreos dunked in milk.

The filling itself does taste very similar to the original.  I probably double-stuffed my Oreos, as you can tell by the photo!

I packaged up the cookies individually in mini treat bags and tied them with a silver twist tie to give to everyone, and everyone enjoyed them.