Shortbread

Shortbread only has three ingredients so it seemed like something I might be able to make. I got a recipe from the Channel Four website for vanilla shortbread that should make twenty four biscuits. It also gives you the nutritional information which I in my neurotic way quite like. Per serving they are 124kcals, 4.6g of saturated fat and 15.5g of carbohydrates. While that’s not that great it’s good to know.

I love the fact that this recipe only has a few ingredients and they are:
1 vanilla pod
100g of caster sugar and a tiny bit extra ‘for sprinkling’
200g of unsalted butter. I used Anchor mainly because I still have fond memories of the adverts with cows. You also need a bit more for greasing
300g of plain sifted flour and again some more for dusting

First off scrape the seeds from the vanilla pod and mix them in to the butter with a wooden spoon. Channel Four includes the handy tip of storing the vanilla pod in a jar of sugar to flavour it. Thanks Channel Four, tell me that now. Because the seeds are sticky you really need to spend some time stirring it all up so they separate and you don’t just have big brown lumps floating about.

You need to mix the sugar and the butter until it’s lightly creamed. The butter should be softened but mine was just room temperature and sweet Christ did it take an age. With all this mixing I’m going to have the muscular right arm of a fifteen-year-old boy.
Once this is done add the flour and a tiny bit of salt and mix it together to form a soft dough. Mine started to look a bit like breadcrumbs so I got my hands in there to blend it together. I don’t know if you should do that or not but it seemed to work and was strangely relaxing. After this wrap it in clingfilm or use a sandwich bag like me and stick it in the fridge for an hour or overnight.

The website now says ‘store the shortbread in an airtight container in a cool place for up to three days.’ I wasn’t sure if this meant you were supposed to leave it for a few days before you cooked it or was just a suggestion for storing the actual biscuits. So I ignored it.

As the whole recipe was quite simple while my vanilla dough was chilling in the fridge I made another batch of just plain old shortbread. After an hour or so I took the first lot of dough out of the fridge and it was rock hard, like Play-Doh left out for a week. There was absolutely no way I could roll it out so I kneaded it for a bit until it was more malleable. When I threw a bit of flour down and went at it with the vaguely virginal rolling pin it cracked but after squeezing it about a bit I managed to get enough dough to stay together in the middle to roll it out to about 5mm. To get twenty four biscuits you should use an 8cm round fluted cutter – apparently – but I’ve got no idea what size the one I bought today is but its biscuit sized at least. I managed to get forty four. Bloody hell. Leave them sitting for ten minutes before baking.

The shortbread should take around fifteen minutes in a preheated oven at 160° on a greased baking tray. Mine took around twenty to twenty five minutes to get a nice golden brown. Once I’d taken them out I shoved them on a baking tray to cool. And… wait for it… They tasted great! Like actual shortbread! As there were so many of them I put one half in the oven first and the second half went in as those were cooling.

My plain shortbread dough was a bit softer than the vanilla but still needed warming up slightly when I took it out of the fridge and still cracked a bit when I rolled it out. But I managed to get forty eight biscuits out of it and they turned out bloody good too.

I’m actually amazed which is a bit sad seeing as these biscuits are basically just butter, sugar and flour. But still, I managed to bake something!