One can't go wrong with shortbread cookies - especially chocolate shortbread cookies. The simple combination of butter, sugar and flour is just delicious. Now that plus chillies. They are perfect.
I got much better with the elephant cookie cutter. This time I cut up the whole batch with it. I got about 60 elephants.
An army of elephants - getting ready to be baked
The cookies came out delicious. Not too sweet. Salty and buttery melt-in-your mouth. Although, the first cookie I tried got a big chunk of chilli in it. I sneezed 3 times after the first bite. It's that spicy. I might need to reduce the chilli portion if I want to make these for public.
Ingredients
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 sticks butter - at room temperature
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 10 chillies - finely chopped
1/2 cup dutch processed cocoa powder
Directions
- Sift flour, cocoa and salt into a clean bowl.
- With an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar at high speed until light and fluffy - about 2 to 3 minutes. Add vanilla extract and chillies.
- At the lowest speed, slowly stir in flour mixture until well combined.
- Ball up the dough, wrap with plastic wrap and keep refrigerated for at least an hour. I left it overnight.
- Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
- Take out the dough and let stand at room temperature for about 10 minutes. On a flour surface, roll out the dough to about half an inch thick. Cut out with cookie cutters or with knife. To prevent the dough from sticking to the cookie cutter, flour it before cutting.
- Place them on the prepared cookie sheets and bake for 25 minutes. Let cool completely on a cooling rack.
Three elephants on top of each other