Not-your-old-fashioned Shortbread
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I’m a huge fan of shortbread, and whilst I love the good old-fashioned plain shortbread, I like to up the ante and add flavours to it. So below you’ll find the basic recipe. I divided this recipe into 4 and added the flavourings to it. Depending on how you slice the shortbread this recipe will make between 50 and 60 pieces of shortbread. You can easily halve this recipe if you want less, but why? these little slices of buttery richness will disappear pretty quickly.
For each flavour, take the quarter recipe and knead the additional ingredients into the mixture.
Coconut Shortbread - add 1/4 cup dessicated coconut
Orange and Cranberry - add 1/4 cup cranberries and grated zest from 1 orange
Chocolate - add 1/4 cup cocoa powder
Ginger - add 1 teaspoon ginger and 1/4 cup crystallised ginger finely chopped
These make a great gift. They also freeze well - just wrap in plastic and seal well, otherwise they may absorb other odours from the freezer. They’ll keep for at least a month in the freezer and are quick to defrost.
Happy Cooking
gill
Buttery Shortbread
2 cups butter (454 grams)
1 cup icing sugar
pinch salt
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 cup cornflour
2 3/4 cups flour
Method
Cream the butter and sugar until pale in colour and well mixed and add vanilla.
Whisk the cornflour, salt, and flour together.
Add the flour mixture to the butter and sugar mixture and stir well.
Split the mixture and add ingredients as above. Feel free to leave some plain.
Shape into rectangle logs, about 2cm high by 15cm long. Refrigerate for about 10 minutes.
Slice into 1cm slices, and arrange on a baking tray, note that they will spread as the butter melts so leave 2cm between each one.
Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit (180 degrees Celsius) for 10 minutes.
Cool and serve.
