brown butter brown sugar shortbread

Fifteen Decembers ago, I shared a recipe for one of the most delicious cookies I’d ever made or eaten:brown butter brown sugar shorties. I told you that because they were impossibly flavorful (nutty brown butter, brown sugar, vanilla, you’re welcome) but not terribly cute (beige, sprinkle-free) you should feel free to keep them home from parties where their feelings could be hurt as they were ignored in favor of the frosted, baubled, and brightly colored popular kids. They’re too good to share, anyway.

But the recipe turned out to fail one crucial test: It doesn’t work for everyone. The problem is the brown butter. All butter has some water content; when we brown it, the water content evaporates off and the amount of butterfat and milk solids left behind is variable. When you’re makingsalted brown butter crispy treatsora wedding cake with brown butter vanilla cake layers, it doesn’t matter: these recipes are forgiving. When you make a shaped cookie, like a slice-and-bake or cookie cutter shape that has to be consistent for everyone, it does. There were so many comments about the cookies turning into a crumbly mess that I had to add a note of caution, warning you to proceed only with modest expectations.

Not a single year has passed in which I haven’t been distressed by the knowledge that one of the most delicious cookies on the website is one of the least reliable, but I come bearing a breakthrough: Keep the cookie, lose the pre-oven structure. By baking these in a pan, just likethe best classic shortbread cookies on earth, the sides hold the shape so the cookies don’t have to. We cut themaftertheir shape is set. And while the squiggle of icing on top isn’t necessary for taste, after so long stuck in the shadows of other, more glamorous cookies, I felt this shortbread deserved a little glow-up for the holiday season, a rightful place in the limelight. 15 years is long enough! I hope you make these immediately.

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