After making the buttered and toast financiers using my bread slice muffin tins, I definitely wanted to do another recipe with them, but this time, shortbread sandos! I have been seeing shortbread sandwich cookies all over the internet, and I figured it would be a cute nod to do something like that, but with bread slice-shaped shortbreads instead! Since we are doing a sandwich as an inspiration, it just made sense to go with a school lunch classic of PB&J! For this recipe, we are using vanilla shortbread cookies for the “bread” of the sandwiches, a strawberry jam, and a peanut butter-miso truffle. When I say truffle, I don’t mean like the fungus that is thinly shaved on top of pasta. I mean like a chocolate truffle. In this case, I went with blonde chocolate, which is a roasted white chocolate, to add a caramel-y note to play off of the butteriness of the shortbread and the tartness of the jam. For the jam itself, I wanted to use a few Harry’s Berries(fancy Californian strawberries that are breed and farmed to be similar in taste to fragrant Japanese strawberries) to make a nice jam, scented with vanilla bean paste and lemon juice to really bring in a pleasant sweet and tart flavor. My personal favorite part in all of this was layering up the cookies, since spreading the miso-peanut butter layer and the jam onto each cookie and then sandwiching together was a very cathartic process(probably because it takes me back to being a kid making PB&Js and having my only concerns in life be whether or not my classmates liked me or not).

When it comes to this recipe, you need the bread slice muffin molds to make the cookies first and foremost. If you want to make this recipe without one of those, just try cutting out square shaped shortbreads instead, unless you somehow have slice of bread cookie cutters(if those exist?). I’ll be honest in that prior to this recipe, and outside of tart shells, I never tried to bake shortbread dough into a specific baking mold before. It was always just rolling out the dough, cutting it into whatever shape I wanted, then baking that. But what was cool here with baking them into the bread slice molds was that they did take, for the most part, the grooves in the tin, making them look like slices of toast bread! I did not rotate my pans, so some of my shortbreads got a little browner, but we’ll just pretend those were whole wheat or rye bread slices. With the fillings, it is important that you chill them both down, as well as the cookies, before attempting to assemble, or else you will end up with a runny messy. The jam is pretty straightforward, while the peanut butter-miso truffle does require melting down blonde chocolate and miso paste, but outside of that, is fairly straightforward. All in all, these were super fun to make, and came together fairly quickly!

Makes 8 shortbread sandwiches:
For the shortcrust dough:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 stick unsalted butter
1/4 cup granulated sugar
a pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg yolk

In a food processor, blend everything together until a dough forms. Divvy up the dough into 20-21g balls of dough per shortbread, and press them into the sliced bread muffin tins. Bake the shortbreads at 375 degrees F for 12 minutes. Allow the cookies to cool before removing from the tins to ensure that they stay intact.

For the berry jam:
6 strawberries, hulled and diced
2 tsp granulated sugar
a pinch of salt
1 tsp lemon juice
1/4 tsp vanilla bean paste

In a small pan, cook all of your ingredients together until the berries completely break down into a soft paste, and is no longer runny. Allow the jam to cool before attempting to use.

For the peanut butter-miso truffle:
1oz blonde chocolate, melted
1oz peanut butter
.1oz white miso paste

Melt the blonde chocolate over a double boiler. In another bowl, mix together the peanut butter and white miso. Fold that through the melted blonde chocolate to form your truffle mixture.

For assembly:
Start by spreading 1 tsp of the truffle mixture onto a cookie, then add on 1 tsp of the jam. Place on the other cookie to form your sandwiches!