After coming out of a highly cookie-packed season in December, I feel you all are probably groaning in your seats that you have to look at another one so soon. My response to you groaners is, good for you. I’m glad December brought a cookie avalanche your way, that you got to feast on creamed butter and sugar for a month, that your stockings and gifts from baker friends consisted of such wonderful, homey, twine wrapped packages of delight. Mine was filled with rest and recuperation. No cookies. No joy. No baker friends kind enough to give me any left over scraps.

I can’t really say I’m planning on turning this January into my supposed-to-be-cookie-packed December, but I did want to at least mention the current cookie stocking our cookie jar. You see, because it’s January and there is usually someone in my house (and it’s never me) who likes to start the New Year off detoxing from the holiday season prior, I usually have to walk through a certain equation to get my better half to see the benefit of January cookies. This year it went as so: brown butter (heavenly) + oatmeal (healthy) + chocolate chunks (pockets of warm gooey delight) = heavenly healthy cookies with pockets of warm gooey delights that cheer anyone up from the typical wintery depression that hits us in the middle of January when the sun ceases to give us rays of joy and warmth — the last part was my mad salesman skills, I admit, but the husband agreed. I could eat them all by myself.

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We are no stranger haters to crispy treats here. We will polish off a pan before dinner and another one afterward — it’s just how we roll. They manage to satisfy both my husband and me — perhaps two of the farthest people on the sliding sweet scale. With a yearly birthday cake like this one (you’ll need a gallon of milk at the ready for downing purposes after your first sliver), it’s pretty much a dead give away that my husband has the sweet tooth of a marshmallow peep stuffed with gumdrops injected with pixy stix all coated in a caramel chocolate turtle shell with pop rocks sprinkled on top. I joke not. Me? I forgo the pies, and pass on normal portions of cake. I like the salty. I much rather eat salt and vinegar chips over a spongy red velvet cream cheese tower. My pitfall, however, is ice cream. It’s all perfect. It is all suited for my mouth. My next pitfall: crispy treats. It’s no wonder the discovery of brown butter crispy treats that were salted was like discovering the best way to blow my mind.

Our lucky streak with those crispy treats didn’t stop there. In fact the next year I tried peanut butter crispy treats. They had a caramel candy coated crispy layer topped with a thick, slightly salty chocolate peanut butter layer, and if that wasn’t enough, a layer of pure chocolate ganache was smoothed out on top. But these, these peanut butter and brown butter crispy treats are the perfect blend, the insanely correct meld, the impeccably ridiculously awesome mesh of the former two treats in one (minus the chocolate, though frankly, I think a thin slip of ganache on top would be wonderful). It has the salty peanut butter and the nutty brown butter mixed together with some overly puffy marshmallows that come together to smother crispy cereal until it all becomes intoxicated with everything I love in life. After this guy, of course.

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This is a celebration people. We have survived the first month, err, I should say our baby has survived. And frankly in honor of our success, the baby’s well being and my current chocolate chip cookie obsession what better way to say thank gawd than these. It was something I was content keeping to myself, I know you all don’t need another recipe for something that is pretty much the same thing over and over — butter, brown sugar, flour, some eggs and chocolate chips. To be honest, to say one recipe is superior to another is something I have scoffed at for years, until now. It wasn’t until I made these, err, someone made these for me that the marathon of *cough* a dozen cookies for breakfast *cough* *cough* came about.

Not only was I blown away by the ratio of chocolate chip to cookie — I’m pretty sure David Leite was trying to find a way to shovel in chocolate chips without having to eat them directly from the bag while maintaining some level of sophistication — but the fact that the chips were still gooey and soft and melty four days later. Seriously. Then my friend gave me the recipe and accompanying dissertation and I, ashamedly, put it aside to pull out the back up of pillsbury I’ve kept on hand since my third trimester cravings.

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If there is one thing a girl’s night needs, it is snacks. Food. Something to shove in your mouth to prevent you from interrupting your other girlfriends who finally want a chance to speak. Or because you’re a girl and you obviously need every excuse to eat something. Just worked out? Yes, I do need that granola bar with a side of eggs. Morning coffee? Why yes barista, I do think I need that overly sugared and dense piece of coffee cake. Girl’s night? Yes, I do need raspberry streusel bars. Why? Because it’s a girl’s night. It is a pact. It is a bond.

This sacred ritual started like most other rituals in a girl’s life: with a slumber party (think about it: pedicures. makeovers. gossip. liking boys. laughing so hard you fart and blame the squeaky chair.). Some might say the slumber party finds its origins in humbler beginnings, perhaps the passifer (Josh calls this thing a binky, I’m not sure where that came from) hastily shoved into a crying baby’s mouth. And though this may be true, not until the slumber party do girls irrevocably learn that being in the presence of one or more other girls in the primary night time hours constitutes a “girl’s night”, and that event requires snacks.

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I have an insane addiction to shortbread — kind of like the addiction I have to all the things I like such as cheese, ice cream, caramelized onions, butter, wine, and pasta. And bread. And mushrooms. And bacon. And ok, I’ll stop now. Shortbread, however, is on my short list of sweet things I like, nay love. Sure most people, such as my husband, go for the three layers of chocolate cake doused in peanut butter frosting and dripping with chocolate peanut butter ganache, or triple chocolate chunk brownies or Chic Fil’A cookies and cream milkshakes, but I go for the shortbread, every time. Not overly sugared, which means you can have a whole box before your taste buds go out and your teeth hurt, they seem light because they crumble in your mouth, sometimes even before your mouth, and they have butter, lots and lots of butter.

And frankly, besides holding out on you err, summer holding out on you, I have not been so kind in sharing the brown butter shortbread, or the pecan shortbread or the other various butter crumbly light cookies that have passed through this kitchen — most of them not even making it to the cookie jar before being consumed. And seeing as it is after all summer, and I am trying to get back in your good graces I decided to share with you these blackberry, orange scented, almondy shortbread cookies, along with a new vow to never leave you hanging again.

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