Shortbread

Looking through ingredients, we needed something quick and easy to fill the oven whilst we made a double batch of choc chip nut butter cookies.  It had to be a bake that wasn't fussy or requiring kit like a mixer...

Grabbing 160g room temperature butter, 250g Dove's Farm Plain flour, 85g golden caster sugar (plus a little less than a Tablespoonful for sprinkling) and a teaspoon of baking powder.  This is what we did -






The sugar and butter was 'creamed' (mixed by squeezing with ONE clean hand - always keep the other free for answering door/tweeting/whatever). 


Then the dry ingredients were included and mixed until it came together in a sort of dough.

Lining a rectangular baking tin, the dough was pressed out to cover the tin. 

Placing the shortbread into a pre-heated 160ºC fan oven (top shelf) it was baked for 25 minutes, checked then returned to the oven for a further 20 minutes.  You may need to check your bake depending on your oven... we were also baking cookies at the same time so the oven temperature varied a little throughout the baking time.

Checking for baking, you can see a thumb print left in the shortbread... it was too soft at that point!

Once thoroughly baked and just starting to brown, the shortbread was removed from the oven, sprinkled with a scant Tablespoon of caster sugar and allowed to cool in the tin for five minutes.  The
shortbread was then scored (we used a metal palette knife) to make portioning easier later.

After cooling fully in the tin, the shortbread was lifted out on the greaseproof paper and cut through (we used a cheese knife from a set that's never been used on cheese!) to make bite sized pieces.  We made 18 biscuits with this amount of ingredients.


Some biscuits were stored in airtight containers and a couple were taste tested with an espresso after a damp dog walk.  The shortbread was judged as "wow" and I was told "you *need* to eat this".  Success on a plate.