Cranberry shortbread

Martha has a recipe for Dried Cranberry Shortbread Hearts in her Cookies book. I've never made shortbread before, and since I was in a cranberry mood, this seemed to be the perfect recipe to try for a first-time shortbread excursion.

Martha's cookies look like this:

The observant TMI reader will notice that my Dried Cranberry Shortbread Hearts are actually squares:

Hearts are nice, but since the shortbread is made in a small 8x8 baking dish, there wouldn't have been many hearts emerging from the batch. Since I made these for a friend's birthday bash, I wanted to have enough to go around. Plus, if I had made the hearts, the scraps would have gone right in my mouth. Right. In. My. Mouth.

And then who knows what would have happened? I might not have stopped with the scraps, I might have started "accidentally" breaking hearts, just so I could eat them up. And then I would go really nuts and just eat the unbroken hearts. And before you know it, I would've eaten the entire 8x8 pan of shortbread!

See how my sweet tooth quickly spirals out of control? My kitchen is a dangerous place for my willpower. It just doesn't stand a chance.

This recipe, like the Magic Blondies recipe from yesterday, is incredibly easy to make. The hardest part was chopping up all of the cranberries.

I served these with the Magic Blondies. Between the two cookies, I definitely filled by cranberry craving.

If you have any dried cranberries in your pantry, I can guarantee you that they are crying out to be used in this recipe. Go on, try it. Hearts or no hearts, this is one delicious shortbread.