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!

Orange and cinnamon butter biscuits

Cheesecake knocked me down but I got up again. And made biscuits.

I got the recipe for lemon butter biscuits off Jamie Oliver’s website. I took his advice and decided to make them a bit more festive by replacing the lemons with oranges and adding cinnamon.

You need:
125g of butter
100g of caster sugar
1 egg
200g of plain flour
The juice and zest of two lemons (or one orange)
¼ teaspoon of baking powder
A pinch of sea salt
Plain flour, for dusting afterwards
3 tablespoons of demerara sugar
And cinnamon if you’ve making orange biscuits

And I actually managed to put all the ingredients in this time!

Put the butter and the sugar in a bowl and use an electric mixer to whoosh it all up until it’s creamy. I’ve never used the electric whisk before and it was terrifying. It should come with heavy-duty earmuffs and an arm rest - I’m actually so lazy I got tired using a machine. Beat in the egg until the mixture is fluffy and light. Then add the flour, the lemon or orange juice and zest, baking powder and salt and mix it in until your poor arm aches. At this point you’re meant to have a ball of dough but mine was a bit like very thick cake mix. It already wasn’t looking good. I started having terrible cheesecake flashbacks but managed to cover the dough and stick it in the fridge for two hours.

My ‘dough’ came out of the fridge quite firm. That tiny seed of hope nestled at the very bottom of my heart blossomed. Until I tried to get the sloppy goop I was planning to bake out of the bowl. My hands were covered in the stuff. You could plaster walls with it. I dunked half a bag of flour down on the surface and coated my rolling pin (new today!) in it. I managed to form a large ball from the dough and things seemed to be looking up. Until I rolled it out. It stuck, fast. Rather than denting the work top and then my skull with my rolling pin I persevered, cutting some lovely biscuit shapes out. With a tumbler. Trying to tug the glass up sounded like pulling your leg, minus one expensive welly, out of a marsh. My uncooked biscuits were not to be moved. In the end I scooped the whole lot up and shoved it on a greased baking tray. I used a cake slice to smooth it out to the required ½cm and sprinkled on the demerara and cinnamon (no cinnamon if you’re doing lemon biscuits) and stuck it in the oven at 180°. If you managed not to bugger the whole thing up like I did you can take your lovely biscuits out after 10 to 12 minutes. I checked on my giant sugary thing after ten minutes and realised it would probably take around double that time as the middle had grown to about two inches thick. I broke a nice brown bit off the edge for an early taste test and it wasn’t that bad. Twenty five minutes later it was still cooking. After ten minutes more I took The Blob out of the oven and shoved it on a rack to cool.

While the whole thing looked like a gingerbread man had been sick it actually tasted okay. Not brilliant, Jamie Oliver would have been very disappointed in me, but edible. When I started cooking I thought I’d take the result in to the office and get everyone’s verdict but I think I’ll wait until I manage to make something that actually looks like food.


I am quite disappointed I couldn’t even make biscuits – something any self respecting six-year-old has mastered. I’ve managed to make a mess of everything I’ve made so far but I am going to keep trying. Cooking is really quite fun if I ignore the massive tantrums I’ve thrown when things go wrong.