Shortbread cookies with chocolate chips that melt in your mouth. The ideal countertop cookie jar cookie is here with a delicious crunchy sugar crust. These are the type of cookies you’d expect for the holidays. It’s a simple recipe that you can prep far in advance to baking.

A shortbread cookie’s texture is created with butter and flour. It’s like making pie dough with a whole lot of butter and baking it. This is where the crumbly melt-in-your-mouth part comes in. Chewy cookies get creamed together with the butter and sugar, and crumbly cookies get smashed together with butter and flour.

Once the dough is made it’s time to roll into a log. This log will help to tighten the dough and prevent it from breaking into a million little pieces. Refrigerate the log overnight or for at LEAST two hours. The longer the setup in the fridge, the more flavor, and the more stability will come.

Before baking the cookies we have one extra step to take to coat the cookies in sugar. Sugar will naturally stick to a buttery cookie like this, but in order to create the signature crust around the cookie we must brush it with egg whites. The egg whites combined with the sugar will crisp and dry out creating that crust. I like to set up two big plates, one with egg whites and one with crystal sugar. The bigger the crystals of sugar, the bigger the crunch. I use demerara sugar or sugar in the raw the best.

Slice and bake your cookies until they just firm together. The ideal shortbread cookies is pale in bake with a slightly golden bottom. Too much browning will dry the cookie out too much. Now all that’s left to do is eat. Get a cup of coffee or tea ready. Cookies are done!