Millionaire's Shortbread Starts With Sweetened Condensed Milk And Store-Bought Cookies

Any recipe that allows you to use shortcuts while still making a tasty end product is worth knowing about. Millionaire's shortbread features a cookie base covered in rich caramel and topped with a marbled layer of melted chocolate. You can skip making the cookie base yourself, but that doesn't necessarily make it a quick dessert. The layers still need time to set, but it's well worth the wait.

While it may sound more a type of cookie, it's more of a dessert square akin to magic bars or seven-layer cookie bars. Rather than baking your own cookies, the bottom layer uses crushed store-bought shortbread combined with melted butter to create a firm, buttery base.

The cookie base is covered with caramel made from sweetened condensed milk, followed by a marbled topping of dark and white chocolate once the caramel has set. The recipe itself takes only about 20 minutes to prepare, but since each layer needs time to cool and set, the total time invested is more than two hours. The store-bought cookies save you the time it would take to make and bake a shortbread base, making this useful when you have other things to do. You can get other tasks done while the layers cool and just devote a few minutes here and there to assembling the dessert. Follow our Millionaire's Shortbread recipe here to get the full instructions.

The recipe gets its indulgent name from the richness of its ingredients, and while it takes some time to set, you don't necessarily need to think of it as a time-consuming dessert. Even our easy three-ingredient shortbread recipe requires more than an hour of combined prep and bake time, so millionaire's shortbread is a time saver.

With the swirled white and dark chocolate on top, the squares also look visually appealing, making them ideal not just for everyday snacks but for bake sales, family gatherings, and holidays. The recipe is also easy to tweak if you want to try some variations. Add a layer of peanut butter on top of the cookies before the caramel, or mix nuts into either the caramel or chocolate layers. For a more upscale version, a little white miso mixed into the caramel makes for a sweet and salty layer.

One thing to keep in mind if you're making these at home is that the delicate chocolate layer cracks easily. Because the caramel and cookie layers are also so thick, it's best to heat a very sharp knife by pouring boiling water over it, then quickly drying it so it slides through all the layers a little easier.