Spruced Up Shortbread Cookies

I am not normally a fan of shortbread cookies – or any cookies that don’t feature chocolate, for that matter. But I was home for the holidays, my mom had a box of shortbread mix that had been given to her by a friend, and I didn’t want it to go to waste. Also I was looking for a new recipe to liven up our usual Christmas cookie options. So I started to think about how I could make shortbread more fun – and how better to do it than cutting it into festive shapes and decorating it?? (And adding in some chocolate, of course.)

What came of my efforts was a cookie that is not only delicious, but also reminiscent of my childhood Christmas cookie baking days. When my brother and I were little, baking (for pretty much any occasion) was a big affair. On birthdays, the person being celebrated was banished from the kitchen while the rest of us made and decorated a cake. On Easter, we make cupcakes decorated like bunnies. For Thanksgiving, it was pecan pie. And on Christmas, we made an assortment of about fifteen different kinds of cookies.

One of the most distinct memories I have of making Christmas cookies is my brother and I, hunched over the kitchen island with cookie cutters, fastidiously cutting as many trees, santas, wreaths and reindeer out of our respective lumps of cookie dough as possible. And then waiting impatiently for them to bake, and even more impatiently for them to cool, before we were allowed to start decorating.

We were quite the enthusiastic decorators, too. Sprinkles, frosting, those red cinnamon ball things, edible gel meant for writing messages – all found their way onto our Christmas cookies. (And all over the kitchen, too. Oops.) I’m going to let you in on a secret though: despite how much fun those cookies were to make, I didn’t actually like them that much. No chocolate. Just kind of a boring sugar cookie. (With really cool decorations.)

So for this recipe, I wanted to come up with something that I would have as much fun eating as I did making. Almost immediately, cookie cutters leaped to mind. I hadn’t used them in years, and as much as I enjoy the present-day rotation of Christmas cookies my family and I make, I missed the fun of making tree and reindeer-shaped cookies. With that thought, those old shortbread cookies were improved by half in my mind already.

The next question was obviously what to do to make them a little less. . . plain. As we know, I’m a fan of chocolate, so that was addition number one. Second, since these are already a throwback by virtue of using cookie cutters, I decided to stay with that theme and spruce them up using some good, old-fashioned sprinkles. The end result is a decadent, double-decker creation with a layer of milk chocolate ganache in the middle, topped with another layer of melted chocolate and sprinkles. Merry Christmas!