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Tahini Chocolate Shortbread Bars

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Shortbread is one of those quintessential Christmas cookies, and while traditional shortbread is always delicious, I like finding recipes with interesting flavours. I came across these tahini chocolate shortbread bars in this year’s Canadian Living Holiday Baking magazine while searching for some delicious-yet-study cookies to send in the mail for the Food52 Holiday Swap (I also made a dark-chocolate-almond-orange version of my favourite biscotti, because biscotti ships well). I love that tahini is showing up in baked goods everywhere (tahini swirl brownies, anyone?) – it’s like peanut butter but a little more grown-up – and I had a feeling it would be excellent in shortbread. Spoiler alert: it is!

Tahini Chocolate Shortbread Bars | Korena in the Kitchen

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Christmas Baking 2010 – Part II

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Hazelnut Shortbread – triangular cookie on the left

As promised is Part I, here is the recipe for Hazelnut Shortbread. As I said previously, this cookie has a beautiful crumbly texture, great hazelnut flavour, and is not overly sweet at all. It may have been my favorite cookie this year.

Again, when baking shortbread, using real unsalted butter is a must. Because there are so few ingredients, butter really plays a starring role, and the flavour will be worth it.

The original recipe directs you to press the dough into two 8-inch cake pans and then score into wedges. I wanted to yield more, smaller cookies, so I shaped the dough into a triangular log, stuck it in the fridge until firm, cut it into slices, and sprinkled each one with raw sugar. The baking time was shorter as well, but I can’t remember exactly how long I baked them for. I would start checking for doneness after about 10 minutes.

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Christmas Baking 2010 – Part I

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Christmas cookie overload!

For me, the Christmas Season begins when I buy my first Christmas cookie magazine of the year. Usually it is Martha Stewart or Canadian Living, but whatever it is, it results in me hauling out my large stack of past years’ Christmas cookie magazines and creating lists of what I’m going to bake this year. This list drafting usually takes me a few tries before I am satisfied with the selection: old favorites, new additions, chocolate, shortbread, dried fruit, nuts, something spicy… the criteria changes a bit every year. The staples for the last few years have been White Chocolate Cranberry Almond Biscotti, Chocolate and Black Pepper Cookies, Sparkly Ginger Cookies, and Lemon White Chocolate Pistachio Sandwich Cookies. Obviously, all this baking results in a profusion of Christmas cookies, which I package up and give to my family and friends as gifts. I figure it’s a win-win situation: I get to bake to my heart’s content, and they get to eat the fruits of my labour.

(Apparently it’s not as much of a win-win for those living with me during this baking mania. Both my roommate and my boyfriend have told me that it’s torture seeing and smelling all these cookies, and but not being allowed to eat any until the leftovers after I have divided them all up into cookie tins for gifting!)

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All content © Korena Vezerian and Korena in the Kitchen, 2011 – 2021. Please contact me before duplicating any content, including pictures. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Korena Vezerian and Korena in the Kitchen with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.