Week 6 - Shortbread (page 44)

Shortbread this week! Butter, sugar, flour and vanilla - a classic combination.

To skip my preamble and go straight to the food, click here.

To skip it all and head straight to the conclusion, click here.

Apologies to mobile users, the photos are sprinkled throughout.

Check out Kristen's post of this cookie here!

---

I am not the hugest fan of shortbread, usually. I find it dry and flavourless, with a weird sort of bitter aftertaste (am I the only one that notices this? If you know why this happens I'd love to hear from you). Shortbread is also classically a Christmas thing for me. Going in, knowing what trouble I had the previous week with the TKO's which are effectively a thin chocolate shortbread, I was kind of dreading these.

Let's dig in, shall we?

---

Shortbread - The original recipe

This is the most simple ingredient list to date. Butter, sugar, flour, salt, vanilla.

Above: Ingredients for shortbread on my scale. Butter (already in the mixer at this point), flour, sugar (one for dusting, one for the dough), salt and vanilla.

Pretty standard start for the cookie recipe at this point, cream the butter & sugar and salt, add the flour but don't overmix. The result, again, was a super crumbly mixture straight out of my mixer, and I was fearing the next step.

Above L-R: Butter creamed and ready for sugar, the resulting crumbly dough once all the ingredients were added

The instructions call to assemble the dough into a square and refrigerate. Remembering last week, I really worked the dough and was patient with it - baking in the middle of the day instead of just before bed likely had a lot to do with my patience being expanded this time, but I also went in knowing what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised.

This dough came together easily, and before I knew it, I had a square-ish block of cookie dough before me. I used a half-sheet sized parchment paper on top of my pastry mat to guide the sizing, and with my hands and trusty bench scraper I worked it into shape. Barely any time had passed, and I was optimistic.

Above L-R: Setting up the parchment, dough crumbles, a block of shortbread dough

At this point, the recipe says to chill the dough, but I don't like rolling out cold dough and I thought that this was already cohesive enough to take a pin to it, so I tried it out. Great success. Now I needed to shape it into a specific shape. A square of specific dimensions, to be exact. The pastry guide under my parchment did an okay job but I really prefer to use thickness guides when rolling out dough, so I started by using my 1/2" guide and found the resulting square to be just shy of what I needed. Next size down was 1/4" which was going to be too thin. So I improvised and combined a 1/4" strip with a 1/8" strip from a completely different set, for the perfect thickness.

Above L-R: 1/2" thick square, then I rolled it out a bit thinner, but the top and left is still not quite there, perfect square, perfect thickness.

So how did I get the square just so? You can see a hint in the middle photo above, but I'll show you exactly:

Above: Parchment with the properly measured square inked on.

I broke out my trusty giant ruler and got to work. As you can see above, a marker works well here, and I was able to use this as a guide under my working parchment so I didn't get purple ink all over my cookie dough.

Once the square was squared away (I'm sorry 😂) I popped it into the fridge to chill before cutting it into the prescribed sizes.

More measuring for the pieces, but I had a tool up my sleeve for this part. I have a pasta cutter/marker that I've used to mark the cutting lines (rather than cut the product itself) bars and other dough in the past. So that's what I did here.

Above L-R: Rolling thickness guides and cutting marker, cookies with a few implements I tried to cut the dough, shortbread on the tray in the oven ready to be baked.

I tried cutting the dough with. pizza cutter as one individual did on another blog - this didn't work out so well, The dough was well chilled and tough to get through with the pizza cutter. I probably could have done it if I hadn't chilled the dough first.

I ended up using my chef's knife which was ideal. It's also worth noting here that I cut it on the parchment on a cutting board, NOT on my Silpat which is not knife safe (ask me how I know).

Not long after putting the tray into the oven, my whole kitchen and eventually upstairs floor smelled like butter and vanilla - absolutely heavenly. At this point I was cautiously optimistic for these cookies. The dough was easier to work with, and they smelled better than last week's.

I left these in on convect for the maximum amount of time, and almost left them longer to get some colour on them. I'm SO glad I didn't.

Out of the oven, still warm, these are decent cookies. Once they're cool though - these cookies are the best shortbread I've ever had.

My observations:

1. The dough was much easier to work with than last week's chocolate shortbread for the TKO's

2. Rolling dough is easiest at room temperature

3. Next time I'll likely roll them a bit thicker & cut shapes for simplicity's sake - measuring the square and the bars were a bit too fussy for me.

4. These are not overly sweet, and would pair nicely with a small drizzle of icing.

5. I want to make these again and play with the flavours.

My spouse, B, sampled these cookies with me.

Our conclusions:

1. The crumb is delicate and flaky and soft, they melt in your mouth.

2. The flavour balance between vanilla and butter is perfect, and they're not overly sweet.

3. No hint of the usual bitterness from shortbread.

4. These cookies are a keeper and a far departure from the usual shortbread we've had in the past.

5. Best. Shortbread. Ever.

A couple of photos after I went upstairs to grab my camera 😆:

Above: Baked cookies on a cooling rack, one has been sampled :D

Above: The plate I picked up fit five cookies perfectly!

Above: Requisite cookie stack

---

TL;DR Conclusion:

• This shortbread recipe is the best I've ever tasted.

• This is now my go-to shortbread recipe.

• You need to try this recipe - Mr Keller, if you're reading this, can we please share it?

I'm personally excited for next week - but you'll have to wait and see what we do!

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here. This is a lot of fun, and I'm enjoying chatting with people over instagram or in person about the weekly bakes.

PS - my bench scraper above is actually a Campbell's Dough Knife, from the UK. I love it and use it in my weekly bread baking endeavours. If you're considering one, I recommend getting it straight from Campbell himself, rather than another mega-corp online shopping app. Not a sponsored blurb, I genuinely love this tool.