Cherry Almond Shortbread Cookies Recipe

Soft and buttery shortbread cookies flavored with cherry and almond, then finished off with sweet white chocolate.

You’ll find three main ingredients in most shortbread cookie recipes: butter, sugar, and flour. All three are imperative for structure, texture, and taste. Sometimes there’s vanilla and salt, but there’s no egg and no leavening. I’ve had a lot of problems in the past with shortbread cookies spreading. There’s so much butter that spreading is often an issue unless you have the right recipe or unless you bake them in a cake pan to make wedge-shaped shortbread cookies (so buttery! so good!).

Today’s recipe starts with these raspberry almond thumbprint cookies, a dough very similar to my basic shortbread cookies. Adding a thin liquid like this (and liquidy maraschino cherries) to a cookie dough so high in butter can spell disaster though. I tested with more flour, less flour, more cherry juice, less cherry juice, etc. I ended up reducing the butter slightly and that seemed to solve all the problems. The shortbread cookie recipe below still has all that extraordinary butter flavor and also includes cherries.

Keep a watchful eye on these cookies as they finish up baking. From a texture standpoint, overbaking the cherry almond shortbread cookies strips their tender, soft, slightly crumbly texture. And you’re left with hard cookies—not crumbly—just hard. And from an appearance standpoint, overbaking will leave orange brown dark spots on top of the cookies. Not a huge issue, but it replaces the pink!

While the cookies have so much cherry, butter, and almond flavor, I felt the cookies lacked something on the outside. A simple white chocolate drizzle makes them a little snazzy, right?

If you love shortbread style cookies, some of my other favorites include these brown sugar shortbread, pecan shortbread, lemon shortbread, & chocolate pistachio shortbread.