Tuesday, February 5, 2008

old Fashioned Favourite



Often when people are asked what their favourite home baking is, they say shortbread. The old fashioned crisp but creamy texture of shortbread is pretty delicious! Actually, I prefer the uncooked shortbread dough!! I am not actually a big biscuit fan – I usually prefer the uncooked dough! Although I do love chocolate chip cookies straight out of the oven – especially with a glass of cold milk!

Anyway, back to shortbread!! I always used to make shortbread using icing sugar, flour and butter. The texture of the shortbread is quite smooth, but sometimes it can have that stick to the roof of your mouth kind of texture which I don’t really like. Now I make a recipe that has castor sugar in it and I like it a lot better. The shortbread seems a lot crisper and has a much nicer texture. The recipe also has rice flour in it which I think adds to the crispness. I really like pale shortbread as well and prefer to cook it for a longer period of time in a cooler oven.

I made this shortbread for a gift last week. Often I make it into different shapes but this time I wanted to just make it into old fashioned rectangles. One good thing about making shortbread into rectangles is that you don’t have to roll out the dough too many times, so it retains it’s lightness. Shortbread is definitely one of those quick and easy things to make that always goes down well!



Shortbread

300g butter, softened
170g castor sugar
400g flour
40g rice flour
20g cornflour

· Cream butter and sugar
· Add half the flour and cream
· Stir in remaining dry ingredients to make a firm dough
· Knead lightly and roll onto floured bench. Cut into shapes
· Bake at 150 for about 20 minutes until still light, but starting to firm up
Cool on wire racks

1 comment:

Cakelaw said...

These look great Tammy. I have never made shortbread (another one of those things I think might be too hard so have never tried), but this sounds good, so maybe I should give it a try.