I made these shortbreads specifically with my plating bestie, Bri, in mind! She was visiting Los Angeles, and I wanted to greet her with a dessert that she never had before. Seaweed desserts are already rare to come by, but adding in tonka bean to that, and I guarantee you that is a flavor combination that is almost never thought of. Seaweed adds salinity and umami to a dessert, in a similar way to miso, while tonka bean is an ingredient that tastes like almond, cacao, and a hint of cherry. When you pair the two together, you get something that has a mild savoriness and a pleasant, sweet fragrance – the interesting thing here is that the tonka actually balances out the salinity in the seaweed, so the final dessert will not taste too fish-y or briny. Bri and I have spoken before about sea grapes, which are these little round pieces of seaweed that pop in your mouth like popping boba, and it just felt like the appropriate garnish to use for these little cookies! I would see them all the time whenever I would play Animal Crossing, and figured since I had some handy, let’s include those in the cookies I’m gifting Bri! If you need help procuring these, Amazon does sell dried sea grapes with instructions on how to reconstitute them. They are convenient to store and easy to use. To help adhere the sea grapes to the cookies, I used a little bit of white chocolate, that I tinted a light blue color using blue spirulina, because why not add more seaweed into this dessert while we’re at it? The end result are these buttery, tender shortbreads with crunchy, nutty seaweed bits, a dash of sweetness from the white chocolate drizzle, a fun little pops of salt from the sea grapes. It might not be the most conventional dessert combination, but I highly recommend trying out tonka bean and seaweed in a dessert sometime if you want something truly unique and different.

From a technical standpoint, shortbreads are not the hardest cookie to make. However, brown butter shortbreads do take more time. The whole thing about shortbread dough is that you need cold butter so that the dough is easy to roll and shape. Brown butter is made by heating then essentially burning your butter. So you will then have to cool that down so that the brown butter re-solidifies before you can even work it into a cookie dough. The benefits of using brown butter in this recipe is that it adds a complimentary flavor that accentuates the nuttiness of the tonka, while adding an almost caramel-like flavor that plays off of the seaweed too, effectively bridging the two ingredients. I am also puffing kombu(dried, thick sheets of seaweed, typically used to make broths or stocks) in the brown butter, just to give it more of that nutty, toasty flavor, while also allowing the kombu to then be processed into a crunchy powder that can then be added to the shortbread dough itself. That and by cooking the kombu in the brown butter, the butter itself takes on that seaweed flavor. So while the dough might take longer to make compared to your usual shortbread, it will be well worth it from a taste and texture perspective! The cookies are finished with a drizzling of tempered white chocolate, and the sea grapes, which honestly can be prepared quickly while the cookies are in the oven. The nice thing about white chocolate is that it tempers relatively easily(due to the high cocoa butter content), so it makes for an easy thing to drizzle on almost any baked good. The only thing to keep in mind is that you have to be quick with applying the sea grapes on top, otherwise the white chocolate may set before you’re ready. But it is all the more worth it when you see the final product!

Makes 16 shortbreads:
For the cookies:
1 stick unsalted butter
1g dried kombu
2 tbsp cold water
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg yolk
.1g grated tonka bean
a pinch of salt

In a pan, heat up the unsalted butter and kombu until the butter turns brown in color, and the kombu puffs up and becomes brittle and crispy in texture. Allow the butter and kombu to cool completely. With the kombu, mince it into a fine powder. Combine all of your ingredients together to form a dough and refrigerate the dough for at least 10 minutes. Roll out the dough to 1/8-inch thickness and cut out 2-inch disks of the dough. Repeat these steps until the dough is fully used. Place the disks on a lined sheet tray, spacing the cookies at least 2 inches apart. Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 minutes. Allow the cookies to fully cool before removing from the baking sheet.

For garnish:
1/4 cup white chocolate chips
1 tsp blue spirulina powder
sea grapes

Over a double boiler, melt 3/4 of the white chocolate chips completely. Then take the white chocolate off heat and stir in the remaining chips until those are fully melted in as well. Then stir into that the spirulina powder. Transfer the white chocolate to a piping bag. Drizzle the white chocolate over the shortbreads and before the white chocolate sets fully, garnish the tops of the cookies with sea grapes to finish.