Fudge Striped Shortbread Cookies

One of my husband's favorite cookies are Keebler Fudge Stripes. I decided that I'd make him some super special Fudge Striped cookies for Valentine's Day. You start with a simple shortbread cookie recipe and then add some melted chocolate, not nearly as daunting as I thought they might be.

To make your own Fudge Striped Shortbread at home you will need:

For the Cookies:

2 sticks of softened butter
1/2 cup vanilla sugar (you could also use 1/2 cup regular sugar and add in 1 tsp vanilla flavor instead)
2 cups flour (plus extra for rolling out your cookies/dusting your cookie cutters)

For the Fudge Stripes:

1 cup chopped dark chocolate
2 Tablespoons butter or coconut oil

Start by creaming your butter and sugar together in a bowl. Once the butter is light and fluffy and all the sugar us mixed in, add your flour and mix until incorporated. Pour your dough onto a floured surface and knead until smooth. Make your dough into a disk shape, cover with plastic wrap and allow to chill for about 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees (F). Take your dough out of the refrigerator and roll it out to about 1/4" thick on a floured surface with a floured rolling pin.

Select your cookie cutters (I chose the heart shapes above) and cut out your cookie shapes. Some of my heart shaped cutters are quite large, so I used a smaller cookie cutter to cut out another heart in the center. I will admit, one thing I never liked about fudge stripe cookies is that they have a hole in the middle, I want MORE cookie, not less. If you agree with me, then you can leave all of your cookies without the center cutout.

Place your cookies onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake for 20-25 minutes, until they just start to brown a little around the edges. Once done, take out and place on a cooling rack until completely cool, mix up your chocolate for dipping while you wait.

I melt my chocolate in the microwave, but you can use a double boiler if you like. Just put your chopped up chocolate into a microwave safe bowl and add your butter or coconut oil. Microwave at 30 second intervals, stirring between each. It takes about 1 minute 30 seconds for all of my chocolate to melt (I stir as much as possible each time, if you need another 30 seconds don't feel bad-it happens).

Once you have your cooled cookies, dip the bottoms of each cookie into the chocolate and place them back onto some parchment (I even put mine on a cool baking sheet and then stick them in the refrigerator to help them set up faster). To make the stripes, I put the remaining chocolate into a sandwich bag, snip off a teeny tiny corner of the bag and use it to pipe on the stripes. These don't have to be prefect, because they are delicious either way. If you don';t want to mess with stripes, you can also just dunk the entire cookie in chocolate!

If you want to see some more "in progress" shots of these guys you can check them out on my Instagram. Happy Valentine's Day!

Friday Food Craft: Perfect Pancakes

Food craft time again, and as I am trying to turn over a new leaf, it isn't dessert this time! Though, you could certainly add chocolate chips and make these pancakes more like dessert if you really wanted to, I won't judge. My husband actually makes these pancakes, aren't I lucky? We went all out this year for the holidays and put them into cookie cutters to make little gingerbread and mitten shapes, but they taste just as good without the trouble. If you do want to make cookie cutter pancakes, just make sure to use metal cutters so you don't melt them, and spray the cutters generously with cooking spray so you can get your shapes out in tact :)



To make these super yummy pancakes you will need:

1 cup All Purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 pinch salt
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 cup milk (you can use either regular milk or buttermilk, depending on your taste)
1 egg
2 Tablespoons fat of choice (we generally use melted butter, but have also tried coconut oil, canola oil, flax oil, etc. anything will do)

*Serves two hungry adults, double or triple recipe as needed.


Start by mixing all of your dry ingredients together in a bowl, so everything is mixed together. Set aside.

In separate bowl, mix all of your wet ingredients together, you will want all of these to be close in temperature (so you don't cook your egg with hot melted butter, or make your hot butter chunk up in cold milk, etc.).

Add the wet ingredients into the dry and stir until just combined. Allow this to sit at room temp while you heat your griddle to medium heat, about 5 minutes.

Pour batter onto a greased griddle and cook until bubbles form all over the top of your pancakes, flip and cook until desired brownness is achieved.

Enjoy with toppings of your choice: butter, syrup, fresh fruit, etc.

Note: These also make fantastic blueberry pancakes, just add fresh blueberries (frozen also work, but the entire pancake typically turns blue, and fresh just taste so much better, so sadly I only have them in the Summer)