Shortbread -- Challenge #25: Anything But Turkey

[ewt]

In my house it isn't quite properly Christmas until someone has made shortbread. The recipe is one my mother got off the back of the Canada Corn Starch box, decades ago -- or maybe her mother did.

Equipment needed:
-bowl
-flour sifter or sieve
-I use a thing called a "pastry cutter" (which wikipedia calls a pastry blender, but I was definitely taught cutter because it's for cutting in), but you can mix this with a fork or mixer or something instead
-cookie cutters, or just cut up the dough with a knife (optional)
-rolling pin or wine bottle or something (optional)
-baking tray
-oven



1/2 cup corn starch (ie corn flour in the UK)
1/2 cup icing sugar
1 cup plain white flour
3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened at room temperature or in a microwave

Sift together the corn starch, icing sugar, and flour. Cut in the butter and mix until it forms a dough. Refrigerate dough (for probably 30 minutes). Preheat oven to 150°C. Roll out dough 1 to 2cm thick on a floured surface and use a cookie cutter or knife to make it into shapes. Bake for 10-15 minutes, do watch it doesn't burn.

How do you measure 3/4 cups of butter without it all sticking to the measuring cup?! There are two ways. One is to fill a large measuring cup with water to the one-cup line, and then add butter, pushing it under the water, until the water gets to the two-cups line. Now your butter is wet and you know how much you have. The other method, which is what I do, is to say that a 250g block of butter is approximately one cup, and 250mL of the other ingredients are approximately one cup, and do things that way. Much less messy! (In Canada when I was growing up, butter came in one pound bricks, or 454g, and we were taught that this was 2 cups.)

My hack for this is to triple the recipe so I have loads of dough, and then roll it into snakes. I double wrap the snakes in greaseproof paper and foil, and then freeze them. When I want shortbread, I take a shortbread snake out of the freezer, unwrap it, put the greasproof paper on the baking tray to save washing up, slice the dough into rounds as soon as it's thawed enough to cut, and bake it; freezing doesn't add a lot to the cooking time so do watch it doesn't burn. If you're really fussed about the cookies being round, you could use a clean thread to do the slices, but I mostly can't be bothered.

You could use salted butter but it isn't as nice, I think. Also, the corn starch, icing sugar and flour can be whatever is cheap, but if you can afford to splurge for nice butter (organic or otherwise posh), this is a recipe where that will make a difference to the flavour; the better the butter, the better the shortbread. However, it's still perfectly edible with supermarket own-brand butter.

Comments

[ewt]

You can also roll the dough into balls and squash them with a fork, the way it's traditional to do with peanut butter cookies.

[miss_s_b]

I like using Lurpak Slightly Salted for shortbread; I wouldn't use a really salty butter, but there's something about having a tiny bit of salt in there.

The bits about approximating measuring cups are fascinating to me, because they're not a thing in British cooking culture at all. Thank you!

[ewt]

Well, 250ml being one cup is pretty standard in a lot of places, though other cup measurements also exist; deciding that 250g butter is a cup leads to very slightly too much butter (225g would probably be a closer approximation of my mother's recipe), but the recipe still works, and if it really is too wet I can always add a bit more flour.

Mostly, though? if I do it this way I can substitute "litres" for "cups" and use three blocks of butter, and then I have All The Shortbread Dough, ready to use when I want there to be fresh shortbread.

I never quite got the hang of cooking with scales. I can completely understand the rationale behind it, but in cases where I absolutely have to use a kitchen scale for something I end up paying close attention to the volume and eyeballing that the next time. It probably doesn't help that the kitchen scales I first used when I moved to the UK were hard to calbrate and hard to read, and I've never invested in a good set because, well, why would I need kitchen scales when I almost always cook by volume?

[miss_s_b]

*nodnod*

Whereas I find cooking by volume completely counterintuitive because I was brought up to use scales LOL

[tree_and_leaf]

This is interesting, as the classic Scottish recipe for shortbread is 1 part sugar, 2 parts butter, 3 parts flour, and that's not quite that. However, it is also quite usual to substitute some of the flour for corn starch - or, even more traditionally, rice flour.*

* Fascinatingly, a lot of early twentieth century Scottish biscuit recipes make use of rice four.