#shortbread

#shortbread

My best baking tip is to always be picky about the type of butter you use to bake delicious shortbread cookies and go for European or European-style butter, which may be, in fact, the absolute best butter for baking. Why, you ask? Let's start by defining how European-style butter differs from American butter. To qualify as European-style, the butter must contain at least 82 percent butterfat and no more than 16 percent water content.

These delicate espresso shortbread cookies - a simple recipe with not too many ingredients - strike the perfect balance of coffee and brown butter. The brown butter has just enough caramel-y oomph to stand up to the espresso. Fiona Zhang says she bakes them so that they're fairly soft - 12 minutes in her oven - but for a snappier, crunchier cookie, they could stay in the oven for a couple minutes longer.

When it's cold outside and snow blankets the ground, try heating up the oven and whipping up a batch of Snowball Cookies. These cookies are crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, and with a hint of coconut added to the frosting, your senses might think you've been transported to a tropical beach. When you make coconut snowball cookies, it's guaranteed to be a white Christmas!

Highkey Sugar-Free Original Sandwich Cookies came in at number one, a strong contender for an Oreo alternative. But if you're a fan of buttery traditional shortbread, Voortman's is the winner for you. These ranked higher than Murray's Sugar-Free Shortbread Cookies - they didn't nail the shortbread texture and were sweetened with sorbitol and malitol, which can bother your digestive system - as well as plain shortbread cookies also from Voortman, which lacked flavor and included sorbitol and malitol, too.