Brown Butter Sea Salt Shortbread

The happy failure of accidentally overcooking the butter you just wanted to melt in a pan is where these cookies begin! My kids had a babysitter that periodically and accidentally browned the butter she was melting for the kids’ pasta. Since that flavor became a real hit in our family, I thought I’d recreate it myself. I quickly learned that trying to replicate her mistake actually took careful oversight!

Brown Butter Sea Salt Shortbread

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks (1 cup) of butter
• ½ cup powdered sugar
• ¼ cup arrowroot powder (or cornstarch if you don’t have this)
• 1 ½ cup flour 
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• Flaked sea salt

Directions:

• Preheat oven.to 350 degrees. 
• Melt the butter over medium heat in a saucepan. Once it starts to foam up, keep stirring it to see the color underneath. When the foam just begins to turn a dark golden color and the butter is a dark golden color, remove it from the heat. Pour it into a dish and refrigerate it until it’s solid and about the consistency of room temperature butter.
• Cream together the sugar and brown butter, being sure to scrape in all the little browned bits of butter! Add in the vanilla..
• Slowly add in the flour, arrowroot powder and salt. Mix until very creamy.
• Use a scoop and put the little mounds about 2 inches apart on a cookie sheet. Then dip the bottom of a glass into flour and flatten each of these little mounds to be about ½ inch high.
• While the oven is preheating, place the cookie sheet with the unbaked cookies into the fridge to chill for about 10 minutes. 
• Bake for 15 minutes or until the bottoms of the cookies just begin to turn golden brown.
• Lightly sprinkle flaked sea salt over the cookies while they’re warm.
• Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheet for about 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.