How To Make The Best Chocolate Shortbread

If you're making chocolate shortbread with chocolate chips, you're doing it wrong. I don't know what to tell you. After 30 years, I've ditched the chocolate chips, the chocolate buttons and it's just perfection. A chocolatier shortbread that makes every bite question why I ever used chocolate chips in the first place. It's super quick and easy to make. We're starting with just three main ingredients, butter, sugar and flour. I've had these ratios down for quite a while. This has been my number one shortbread base recipe since pretty much forever. So grab a large mixing bowl and in goes 225 grams of unsalted butter. So I like to use softened butter in this recipe because it makes it really easy to mix and it gives it an amazing texture. Also, I always add the butter before the sugar and the flour because if you do it the other way around, it can make a lot of mess. In goes 115 grams of granulated white sugar. You can use caster sugar if you prefer but I personally love the texture of granulated sugar in this. And in goes 320 grams of plain flour. I also like to put this in last because it covers the butter so when we go in to mix it with our hands, we're not just diving straight into butter, you know. I'm also going to add about half a teaspoon of salt. Trust me, this makes the shortbread and the chocolate just come alive and it cuts through the sweetness. You could also use salted butter instead of unsalted butter but doing it this way just allows you to control the amount of salt that you put in. Now, I love mixing this with my hands. It reminds me of my childhood but I know it's not for everyone. If you are going to do it with your hands, just make sure you remove any rings because otherwise they do get absolutely caked in dough. So we're just going to go straight in and we're just going to start squeezing it together. Now the ingredients have come together, you're just going to rub it in between your fingertips to make sure there's no large lumps of butter, there's no stray bits of flour anywhere and you want it to be nice and crumbly like this but if you squeeze it, it should hold its shape. All right, perfect. I'm just going to go wash my hands. Now that's all mixed in, we're going to add the key ingredient, the chocolate buttons. I'm using 180 grams and I found this is the perfect ratio for this amount of shortbread. Food is all about ratios, that's what makes recipes work and taste different. It's like buying a brownie and expecting them to all taste the same. Tesco brownies just aren't on my level, you know. I'm using Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate buttons today but any milk chocolate buttons will work. Oh, that went well. In they go. Oh, well that one opened a bit easier. I reckon this is about 20 grams for me, for the cook. We like snacks too. There might be one on the floor. No stress. So we're just mixing these in until they're evenly distributed and we're going to get nice big chunks of chocolate throughout which means it's going to be more flavoursome for creamier bites. Okay, that looks good to me so I'm just going to set this aside and I'll grab our tins. I'm going to show you a quick hack of how I line my tins nice and neatly. So you need two tins of the same size and this is the baking paper that I like. It's called Bacofoil non-stick baking paper. So pull that over so you've got enough overhang. Grab the other tin and you're just going to press down and then you're just going to wrap the edges and crease them nice and tightly and then you take it off and it should hold. Now you're just going to tip all of your shortbread mixture into your tin. Oh, this bit doesn't want to come out and you're just going to spread it out evenly. You can do this with a spoon or you can use your hands again. So I like to push it out when it's nice and crumbly first to kind of get it roughly in the position that I want it before pushing down. You can also move the chocolate buttons into the position that you want them and then just start to press that down nice and gently at first. There you go. So I've pressed that down firmly now so it should be nice and flat and even. Now this part is totally optional but I'm going to sprinkle some more granulated sugar on top. For me, I feel like it gives it a real classic shortbread look and feel and a little bit of extra sweetness too. There we go, that looks like a good amount. Now you're going to bake this in the oven at 160 degrees if you have a fan oven, 180 degrees if you don't have a fan oven for about 20 minutes until the edges are lightly golden but the top is still pale. If you bake it until the top is all totally golden it's going to be over baked and you're going to have a hard crumbly shortbread rather than a soft buttery one so don't do that. Our shortbread is now fully baked and cooled so you can see that the edges are nice and golden but the middle isn't super golden so I'm actually going to sprinkle a little bit more sugar on it, on the bits that look a little bit sparse. Don't judge me, I like a lot of sugar on my shortbread okay, it's nostalgic for me. Perfection. All right, let's cut it up. Let's take this out the tin, pull those edges down. I have the big knife, let's see how evenly we can do this. Knowing me, probably not very even. Listen to that crunch. And then in half again. Oh yeah, that's about it. Delicious. All right, let's have a look at it. Perfection. This is cooked so well, you can see how like moist and buttery it is and there is so many chocolate buttons in it. All right, let's give it a go. Wow, homemade shortbread is so much better than shop-bought shortbread. Wow, that's so good. Can we all agree that chocolate buttons are better than chocolate chips in shortbread? Can we get like, ditch the chips on a t-shirt? Wait, no, that we can't do that, can we? What about cookies? We still need our chocolate chips for cookies. Now I think this would be a great time to plug my brand new cookbook, Fitwaffle's Easy Six, where you can find loads and loads of sweet and savoury recipes that use six ingredients or less, just like this one. There's loads of easy dinner ideas in there, lunch ideas, breakfast ideas, and of course lots of desserts and you can order it now on Amazon or wherever you like to shop for books. So let me know if you order it and I hope you love it. Oh, and one last thing, don't forget to like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video. Love you, bye!