The other day, my family and I had just finished a pleasant dinner outside when we decided that we would watch the new Netflix movie, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. My mother is German, and my sister lived in Austria for two years, so Eurovision has been a part of our lives for some years now. The movie was hilarious, charming, and thoroughly delightful, and I highly recommend it, but that is not the point of this post. The point is that before we watched the movie I decided I desperately needed cookies. 

Because the need was dire, I chose to make the simplest type of cookie: the shortbread cookie. Then, my sister reminded me that she had recently bought orange blossom water from our local middle eastern market, so I decided to replace the vanilla extract I would normally use with that. Of course, when I think of orange blossom and middle eastern flavors, I immediately think of pistachios, which I happened to have around. And finally, no cookie is complete, according to my mother, if there is no chocolate therein, so I chopped up some 72% dark chocolate into shards that tend to melt more easily into shortbread cookies than chocolate chips do. 

The final result was possibly one of my favorite cookies of all time. The orange blossom water makes the cookie taste light and floral, and the texture is amazingly buttery and tender. I suggest refrigerating the cookie dough for at least 2 hours to make it easier to cut, but, as previously stated, this was an emergency, so I shoved the dough in the freezer for 15 minutes, and then had to reform the crumbly cookies that fell apart as I sliced them, so don’t feel constrained by the long rest time. Cookies always find a way.