Melt in your mouth tender shortbread, with a Fall inspired twist. Made with real pumpkin and pumpkin spice. Perfect for snacking alongside a cup of coffee or tea during cozier weather.

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People have been enjoying a little something sweet with a beverage since Ancient Rome. This shortbread is the sweeter and more delicate answer to the crunchy and high maintenance biscotti, and is just the thing to have alongside a warm cup of coffee on a crisp autumn morning or cozy afternoon snack.

If you are familiar with my lavender or brown butter variations of this recipe, then you know I hold this shortbread recipe dear to my heart. It makes perfect sense that I found a way to combine the festive and cozy flavors of Fall with one of my favorite treats. This has become a go to Fall recipe because it is easy to make, stores very well, is enjoyed by people who don’t think of themselves as dessert people, and a is little bit of a novelty since people tend to not make shortbread.

Most people who grow up in the United States are only exposed to shortbread if their parents where gifted one of those blue tins at Christmas time with seemingly endless mini cupcake liners filled with crunchy, buttery shortbread cookies. It always perplexed me when I ate so many of them because they were so dry, and yet the buttery goodness combined with the crunchy sugar topping always had me reaching for more. I don’t recall even knowing they were shortbread until much later in life when I wasn’t living with my parents anymore and a nostalgic craving hit me.

This shortbread on the other hand is not crunchy, but instead soft, & melts in your mouth. It’s extremely snackable & divine with coffee. I recommend having a plan for where it will go when you make it, or you might accidentally keep them all for yourself in a single afternoon.

When to use this recipe

These are the perfect addition to your Home Coffee Shop during the Fall

A fun treat to add to a Boo box for a neighbor.

Bring to any Fall craft party or picnic

They are the perfect dessert for the person who doesn’t really like sweets since they are small and have strong butter flavor.

Save to have as a little something special during your morning or afternoon warm beverage

Ingredients

1/2 cup Unsalted butter, browned
1/4 cup sugar + 4 teaspoons, for dusting
2 tablespoons Pumpkin puree
2 teaspoons Pumpkin spice
3/4 teaspoon Sea salt
1 1/4 cups All-purpose flour

Equipment you’ll need

Stand mixer or hand mixer: For mixing the dough. I find the hand mixer works particularly well with this recipe.

Medium and large metal mixing bowl: For cooling the butter

Large balloon whisk: For whipping the butter, could also use hand mixer

Measuring cups & spoons: For measuring the ingredients

Kitchen scale: For measuring the flour, if you own one

Parchment Paper: For lining the baking pan

8x8 baking pan (metal preferred): For baking the shortbread

Step by step instructions with pictures

Preheat the oven to 300°F, and line an 8"x8" baking pan with parchment paper. You technically don't need the parchment, but it is much easier to remove when it has parchment, so you can get prettier pieces.

Prepare a large bowl with a couple of handfuls of ice and cold water, then place a medium-sized metal bowl in the ice water. Place a container with two tablespoons of water next to it.

Brown the butter in a small saucepan (see explanation on browning butter if needed). Once the butter starts to foam and the crackling slows down to a polite applause, removed the pan from the heat and pour all of the butter into the metal bowl sitting in the ice bath. Be sure to scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom and get it into the mixing bowl--that's where you'll get the caramel flavor.

Start whisking immediately with a large balloon whisk or electric mixer on low. When the butter starts to take shape, add pumpkin puree, salt, and pumpkin spice to the butter. Keep whisking until the butter reaches a whipped consistency, about 2 minutes.

If the butter starts to freeze to the sides, remove from the ice bath and continue whisking while scraping the butter off the sides. Check the temperature of the butter, and return to the ice bath if it still feels warm to the touch. If the butter is still warm, it will liquify when the sugar is added and not be able to hold air, and you’ll miss out on the flakey buttery texture. When the butter is at the right consistency, it should feel at least body temperature or a little bit cooler and have a whipped appearance (see below).

Remove the bowl from the ice bath. Add sugar to the butter, and whip together for two minutes with a hand mixer, scraping the sides with a rubber spatula as needed.

Scrape the side of the bowl with a large rubber spatula. Add the flour (fluff flour with a whisk, and scoop into measuring cup to measure if you aren't measuring by weight. Use the flat side of a butter knife to level; do not shake to level.), and mix on low until butter just starts to coat all of the flour and form small clumps. Use a rubber spatula to stir and make sure no dry pockets of flour are at the bottom.

Press into the prepared baking pan and dust evenly with 4 teaspoons of sugar. I like to use organic granulated sugar because the crystals are larger, but nonorganic sugar works here as well.

Bake for 22-25 minutes, rotating halfway through, until the corners barely start to brown and the middle starts to look puffy.

Let cool for 15 minutes, or until the pan is cool to the touch before removing from pan and cutting. I like to cut into 16-20 squares or rectangles, but sometimes I cut them into triangles. They are slightly more fragile when they are cut into triangles, so be mindful when you store them. Store in an airtight container for up to five days or in the freezer for up to one month.

How to Brown Butter

If you’ve never browned butter before, you may feel intimidated, but I promise with a little bit of supervision you’ll know how to zhuzh up an every day ingredient into something even more complex and special.

The process of browning the butter does two things: 1) Cooks off the water in the butter, which means that the resulting browned butter will be about 20-25 grams lighter, and have about 30% less volume than butter that has been simply melted; and 2) Separates the whey, or milk proteins, from the butter fat and toasts the milk protein so that it has a wonderful nutty caramel aroma and flavor (if you’re a food science nerd, this is called the Maillard Reaction, and is the same process that makes perfectly browned grilled cheese so delicious).

If you start the process with butter cold from the fridge, it takes about 5 minutes over a medium heat. The trick with browning butter, is that it can go from browned to burnt in a matter of seconds, even after it is taken off the heat. When I had my home bakery, I had a cookie recipe that I used to make thousands of massive (almost 1/2 lb cookies), and the recipe took a lot of browned butter, so I have had quite a bit of practice, and here is what I have learned:

Use a small - medium stainless steal (not non-stick or glass) saucepan to brown the butter. If you are browning a large amount, then make sure you use a medium-large sauce pan since the butter foams and expands as the water is evaporating.
Once the butter is fully melted and starts to crackle (this is the sound of the water evaporating) watch it very closely. Don’t walk away or multitask or you could miss the window.
Keep an eye on the pan as it is cooking, and rotate it or scrape the sides with a rubber spatula if you notice one part of the pan is browning the butter early.
Use your ears to tell when it is close. Dorie Greenspan described the crackling slowing down to a “polite applause” when it is almost done, and a few seconds after is when I typically remove the pan from the heat.
Another sign it is ready is when it starts to foam and smell nutty, take it off the heat. You won’t be able to see the browning, but trust me it is forming beneath the foam.
If you move the foam aside and can see the bottom of the pan, and nothing looks browned yet, do not fret—the carry over heat from the pan will finish the browning. If you wait a few seconds too long and the butter is turning dark brown, then quickly use a rubber spatula to scrape all of the browned bits into an empty bowl before the residual heat from the pan over cooks it.
Be careful adding any other ingredients to it, if it has moisture, it will seize, and the steam can burn.
Wait a few minutes for the pan to cool before using a rubber spatula to scrape all of the lovely brown bits you can into a heat proof bowl

Can this recipe be doubled?

Yes! I double it all of the time, and make it in a 9x13” pan. I wouldn’t try to triple or quadruple and bake in a larger pan, because it can be difficult to bake properly and may dry out before fully cooking.

My shortbread turned out crunchy, what went wrong?

You either over mixed the dough or baked it for too long. You want the dough to look like wet sand and barely come together (see the picture). If you over mix and it forms a cohesive dough that you don’t have to press together, it will probably be crunchy. If they start to brown then they have gone too far. Make sure you watch closely at the end of baking and bake on the center rack of the oven. I have also found that if I try to make more than a double batch in a 9x13, such as if I quadruple the batch, it can be really hard to bake properly and they dry out by the time they are fully baked.

Why did shortbread taste dry?

You either added too much flour or overbaked. If you don’t have a scale to measure by weight, then whisk or fluff your flour with a fork then use a spoon to scoop the flour into the measuring cup.

Can this be made gluten-free?

Pastry is really tricky to get right using gluten-free flour. I have tried making this recipe with Trader Joe’s 1:1 gluten-free flour blend, but it came out oily and had a weird aftertaste. You might have luck with King Arthur Flour GF Bread Flour, but that isn’t safe for people with wheat allergies.