Brown Butter Shortbread for the Win

Raspberry jam seals the deal

Each tradition has its traditions, and mine lacks cookie. Potato pancake: yes. Cookie, generally: no.

So when my friend Michele suggested a holiday cookie exchange, I shrugged.

She explained: Each friend bakes a batch and brings it to a central cookie depository (say, her dining room), where the goods are sampled and redistributed. Come with one sort; leave with many.

Though new to the ritual, I readily picked up on its core value: winning.

I studied Michele’s instructions with college-level intensity. Bake seven dozen, plate two dozen, package five dozen. Arrive hungry.

I read up on gingerbread and peppermint, crinkles and bars, but settled on my standard: two tiny shortbread rounds pressed against raspberry jam, which peers through an even tinier cutout window. Thinking seasonal, I picked stars.

It’s a slow cookie. I generally assemble precious few, and offer them as valentines to precious fewer. Not a 14-dozen kind of cookie.

And yet, it offered my best shot at Best.

I stirred and rolled and cut and baked and filled. Then considered presentation. The shortbread-framed raspberry star is best packed flat. Rejecting tin, box, and carryout contraption, I tossed my theater tickets and spent an evening folding brown paper packages tied up with strings.

On exchange day, the contestants stood ready for review. Brown-sugar bars, chocolate-dipped chocolate chips, festive meringues, candy-speckled crunches. As well as Michele’s entry: a pair of shortbread rounds, pressed, unnervingly, against raspberry jam.

I bit. It offered a heartbreakingly tender texture and warm brown-butter flavor. It was, in the words of my youngest cookie connoisseur, the best cookie in the world.

So I settled for the consolation prize: Michele’s recipe.