Espresso Shortbread Cookies with your Morning Espresso - Delicious Double Whammy of Caffeine!
Your morning taste buds will thank you!
These cookies are double tasty with flavors that belong together - chocolate, espresso (NOT EXpresso) and almond. These are really coffee flavored cookies, but expresso sounds so much more sophisticated...and using fresh finely ground coffee beans give you that stronger coffee or espresso flavor. These flavors are all combined into an easy and delicious shortbread cookie.
Cut them in any shape, squares, rounds, triangles, etc. Drizzle them with white chocolate and dunk them in coffee or another favorite hot beverage. If you don't dunk, at least have them with a fresh cup of coffee to get going in the morning. This is an easy recipe with some hand mixing, so there's definitely no need to drag out the big electric mixer.
Preheat your oven to 325F degrees.
Prepare your baking pan:
Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper. No need to butter or grease your pans.
Ingredients:
1 C Powdered sugar
1 C (2 sticks) Butter, softened
1 t Vanilla Extract
1 t Almond extract
1 t Ground coffee beans, freshly ground
1 2/3 C Flour
1/3 C Cocoa powder
1/8 t Salt
1/2 C Almonds, rough chopped
Stir up your shortbread dough:
- Beat the butter and powdered sugar together.
- Add both extracts and stir.
- Add ground coffee beans and stir to all combined thoroughly.
- Add the flour, cocoa powder, salt and almonds. Stir thoroughly.
Cut your cookies:
- Roll the dough out between two large sheets of parchment paper. Refrigerate on a cookie sheet for about 20 minutes. - Cut the cookies - I usually cut them in easy side by side rectangles with a knife or a curvy hand vegetable cutter to give them a prettier appearance with scalloped edges. If you use cookie cutters, then there will be a lot of left over dough to reroll. I prefer to cut everything in side by side squares, triangles or rectangles so as not to create extra dough to reroll. Rerolling the dough can cause it to get a little tough. These cookies should be delicate and crunchy.
- Refrigerate the cut out cookies for 10 minutes.
- Bake at 325F degrees for 12-14 minutes.
- Cool on a rack a couple of minutes before taking them off the cookie sheets.
- Make the glaze and drizzle over the cookies.
Glaze Ingredients:
1 1/4 C Powdered sugar
1 t Vanilla extract
1 t Coffee flavor, or 1 T coffee liqueur
2 T Milk
1 t Corn syrup
Glaze the cookies:
- Whisk all ingredients together. But, add just 1 tablespoon of milk at a time. You can substitute warm coffee, but the glaze will turn light brown - and that's okay if you like it that way.
- Add a little more milk or powdered sugar to get it to the right drizzling consistency.
- Drizzle the glaze in different patterns to add interest.
Ground coffee beans:
I grind my own flavored coffee beans by grinding them once, and then a second time in my little electric coffee grinder. They will give the cookies a deeper coffee flavor than if you used liquid coffee. In fact, I use whatever flavored coffee beans I have on hand, whether it's vanilla hazelnut or almond or crème brulee or something else I've been enjoying every morning. My beans are always decaffeinated. Of course, caffeinated beans work, too.
For round cookies:
- For round cookies, roll the dough in a log instead of rolling it out between two sheets of parchment paper.
- You can easily roll one or two long logs by placing the dough on a sheet of plastic and working it into a smooth log with flat ends. Roll the logs to the diameter you like - large or smaller.
- Refrigerate the logs for 30 minutes. Then cut them in about 1/4" discs.
- Lay them on parchment lined cookie sheets and bake the same as above.
- Cool and drizzle with glaze as noted above.
Decorating Options:
- If you want a little more chocolate, sprinkle mini chocolate chips on top, or shave a dark chocolate bar for a special topping.
- Many people like cherry and chocolate, so chopped dried cherries sprinkled on top of the wet drizzle can give those people their cherry fix.
- Others like the combination of orange and chocolate. Chopping up dried oranges or candy orange slices sprinkled on top of the drizzle before it dries can be very pretty on these chocolate shortbread cookies.
- For a double dose of chocolate and coffee, sandwich two cookies together with some of the drizzle between.
- Instead of making the glaze for drizzling on the cookies, try some of those handy candy melts - any color. Warm them up according to the directions on the package.
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