These melt-in-your-mouth shortbread cookies were inspired by travels among Tuscany’s olive groves and citrus trees. For a healthier spin, they use olive oil instead of butter and are generously flavored with fresh rosemary , orange zest, and honey.
Click here to skip to recipeAs the weather warms up, I’ve been craving the perfect spring-flavored dessert. Something with bright, fragrant notes that can lift my mood and make me dream of sunshine. I found myself returning again and again to the flavors of rosemary, orange, and olive oil.
These are the flavors that I recall when I remember the spring and summer I lived in Italy. I can close my eyes and see sunlit fields of olive trees, and I remember laughing under citrus trees, their boughs heavy with fruit. I can smell the sharpness of rosemary in my cooking class and feel the flour between my fingertips as I made fresh pasta. So maybe that’s why when I think of the perfect spring, these flavors immediately come to mind.
What I love about these cookies are their simplicity. You simply add all the ingredients to a bowl and combine. And because we use olive oil instead of butter, there’s no need to wait for ingredients to come to room temperature. I enjoy topping these off with flaky sea salt for a wonderful sweet and salty combination, and I highly recommend. It’ll make a difference, I promise. For decoration, I simply press on more fresh herbs before baking to create springtime patterns.
Helpful tips
- I don’t like my cookies very sweet, so have not added as much sugar. You can add up to 1 cup if you prefer your desserts on the sweeter end
- The dough should be quite wet and stick together easily before you put it in the freezer
- Because of the olive oil, it is important to freeze for at least one hour before slicing and baking. If you’re not a fan of slicing, you can shape into circles and press down instead.
- The cookies do not spread much at all in the oven
- To make these vegan, remove the honey or replace with maple syrup.
Tuscan shortbread cookies (rosemary olive oil)
Equipment
- 2 baking sheets
- 1 medium mixing bowl
- plastic wrap
- Parchment paper
Ingredients
- 3 cups (375g) all purpose flour
- 1 cup (240g) olive oil
- 4 tbsp orange zest (about 2 oranges)
- Juice of 1 orange
- 1 tbsp chopped rosemary
- 1 1/3 cup (167g) powdered sugar
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 3 tbsp honey
For topping
- Additional fresh rosemary
- Flaky sea salt
Instructions
- In medium mixing bowl, mix together flour, orange zest, chopped rosemary, salt, and powdered sugar. Stir in orange juice and honey.
- Slowly pour in olive oil, mixing as you pour until all of the oil is incorporated. The dough should be wet and almost a little greasy.
- Divide dough in two and place each half on a piece of plastic wrap. Roughly shape into a cylinder, wrap, and place in the freezer for 1 hour. Make sure the dough is tightly packed together.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and line two baking sheets with parchment paper
- Remove dough from freezer and unwrap. Slice cookies about ~1/4 in. thick. If not perfectly round, shape the slices gently with your finger. Place about 1 in. apart on baking sheet. Press fresh herbs on top for decoration and sprinkle with sea salt.
- Bake for 15 – 18 minutes. until bottoms are slightly browned. Remove from oven and let cool. They will firm up after cooling.
Delicious! These are the best cookies I have ever made, or maybe even tasted outside of Italy. I have to admit that I had serious doubts when the dough turned into a gooey mess after adding the olive oil, thinking that either you are I must have made a terrible mistake. But I made the logs and continued anyway, and everyone loved them (especially the vegans and dairy free people). But a couple of suggestions: The dough needs to be frozen for more than an hour I think. I baked the first log after an hour in the freezer hour, but the second, frozen solid after about three hours made better cookies. I also popped the sheet with freshly cut cookies back into the freezer for about fifteen minutes. Oranges: It would be helpful if you gave a quantity for orange juice rather than “juice of one orange”. Up here in the frozen north, our oranges may have lost some juice on their long journey so I used juiced two or three. And it took about four navel oranges to yield two tablespoons of zest. Thank you so much for this fantistic recipe.
Hi Patricia, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment! This is one of my first recipes I posted and my recipe writing skills have improved greatly since then. This deserves a revisit on my end and I’ll work on clarifying the quantities and process!