These shortbreads are meant to be decadence incarnate. I really wanted to celebrate chocolate in its darkest and richest flavors, and what pairs better with cocoa than butter and sugar? So with that logic in mind, I decided to make these buttery shortbread cookies, flavored with black cacao, and studded with chocolate throughout. One of my personal favorite recipes I came up with back in college were these chocolate chip shortbreads. While the cookies are warm, the shortbreads are soft and the molten hot chocolate is gooey. But the magic, in my opinion, is when the cookies are cold, as the shortbreads are still buttery and tender, but the crunchy shards of chocolate just add this addictive texture to the final product – I still remember inhaling an entire batch of these on my own. So I wanted to celebrate the finer things in life with this recipe, and make a shortbread cookie that uses three different kinds of Valrhona chocolate, cacao nibs, and to really accentuate the chocolate and cocoa notes, tonka bean. Valrhona is a bougie and highly expensive chocolate brand – I personally love using their flavored Inspiration line, since they include things like Passionfruit, Raspberry, or Yuzu-flavored chocolates! However, in this case, I am using a variety of their milk, semisweet, and dark chocolate for my recipe. For the dark, I am using their Guanaja, a 70% dark chocolate that has a notably bitter cocoa taste but a buttery finish. With the semisweet, we are using Manjari, which has more floral notes that I personally think play off of the crunchy cocoa nibs quite nicely. For the milk chocolate we have their Azelia, which is a hazelnut-scented chocolate, a lot sweeter than the other two, but the hazelnut and tonka work well together – tonka bean is essentially a cousin to a vanilla bean with flavors of almond, cherry, cocoa, and vanilla in it. This recipe is honestly the definition of bougie and probably not one that people would want to make as-is, given how expensive all of these ingredients are.

Now that I got the warning about the price tag out of the way, you can totally substitute the chocolate with any brand you want, and the tonka bean with vanilla and save yourself probably anywhere from $20-$30 right there. I won’t judge you, it just so happened that a lot of things lined up for me to be able to get all of those bougier ingredients into my pantry. The cocoa nibs are used to add a bitterness and crunch so that the final cookie isn’t too sweet. The black cacao powder, or Dutch-processsed cocoa powder, has this rich, dark chocolate flavor, similar to an Oreo, with fruitier finishes. I personally love using black cacao powder, something that I learned about when working at Milkbar, and it has been my go-to for a lot of chocolate desserts since! The recipe itself is a shortbread dough, so temperature comes into play a lot. It will be easier to shape the dough once it is chilled, so after you are done making the dough, give it ample time to cool down so that you can cut out very clean and consistent cookies Outside of the pricey ingredients, I would say that this recipe is pretty standard, easy to follow, and not that difficult to execute. Remember that you can make substitutions to the chocolate, cocoa powder, and tonka bean, and if you don’t have cacao nibs handy, just omit them. While they add a pleasant texture and crunch, they are expensive and not the easiest to get ahold of(I got lucky in that my friend gifted me a ton of them, so I avoided getting hit with a $20 price tag to buy a bag of them from Wholefoods). All in all, make this recipe if you love double chocolate chip cookies, since these shortbreads are essentially quintuple(three different kinds of chocolate, cacao nibs, and cacao powder) chocolate chip cookies, so 2.5x that!

Makes 16-20 shortbread cookies:
For the dough:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1oz cocoa nibs
.5oz black cacao powder
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 stick unsalted butter
a pinch of salt
.1g grated tonka bean
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup chopped milk chocolate(I used Valrhona Azelia 35%)
1/4 cup chopped semisweet chocolate(I used Valrhona Manjari 64%)
1/4 cup chopped dark chocolate(I used Valrhona Guanaja 70%)

In a bowl, mix the flour, cocoa nibs, black cacao powder, sugar, butter, and salt until everything is combined into a sandy-textured dough. To that, mix in the tonka bean and egg yolk to form your dough. Mix into the dough the chopped chocolate pieces first. Place your dough onto about a 15 inch-long strip of cling wrap and be sure to cover the entire dough in it. Roll the dough until it forms a log that is about a 12-inch long by 2-inch in diameter log of dough. Refrigerate the dough log for at least 1 hour. It should be completely solid.

Cut out 1/4 inch-thick disks from the dough and place onto a lined sheet tray, keeping each disk of dough about 2 inches apart from each other. Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 minutes. Allow the cookies to fully cool before removing from the sheet tray and transferring to an airtight container.