July Recipe: Chocolate Chip Shortbread Bars

It's my first official summer in Boston, and I gotta say that the weather is confusing for a California girl like me. One day it's hot and humid, the next it is pouring rain and thunderstorming all over the place. Anyway, I took advantage of one of the cooler, rainier days to bake a little snack for myself. Seeing how I had run out of eggs, shortbread immediately came to mind. So I took a popular recipe from allrecipes.com for Tina's Shortbread Chocolate Chip Cookies (link), and made them into bars. 

At first, the dough was really crumbly as seen in the picture below. So I really got my hands into it, and it finally started forming a cohesive ball of dough.

The dough was actually a really nice, moldable texture without being super sticky like traditional cookie dough. That made it pretty easy to mold into a rectangle on my buttered pan.

After about 17 minutes in the oven, I pulled them out and let them cool for a little bit. While they were still warm, though, I cut it up into bars with my spatula.

And the resulting bars were very buttery, flaky and delicious! I'm very pleased with how they turned out. I think next time, I would substitute chocolate chips for something a little lighter and less sweet like pistachios or maybe even dried fruits? Anyway, this was a really great recipe for the shortbread base dough, so I'm definitely keeping it bookmarked for the future!

Categories: baking, chocolate chip shortbread bars, chocolate chips, July recipe, resolutions, shortbread