Shortbread, Three Ways

I actually made these cookies way back at the beginning of the semester, for a housewarming party my roommates and I had (we were super lucky with our senior year housing--and only had two cockroaches this year so far!)

My roommate Imani and I both have the same compulsive fear of underfeeding people and running out of food, so we made a huge batch of shortbread cookie dough (and then ran out last minute to buy chocolate and fruit, because we were convinced people would starve). One of the things I love most about shortbread (besides its wonderful buttery texture and flavor) is that it's so wonderfully adaptable. With minimal effort, you can transform a single batch of dough into a multitude of impressive cookie varieties. Which means, of course, that it's perfect for the holidays.  

 I used this dough to make some pretty classic jam sandwich cookies (which you've probably seen several. times. before), thumbprint cookies with a lemon twist, and traditional Scottish shortbread (well, not so traditional, because I added both egg and cornstarch).

This dough is delicious and so easy to put together. I rarely make a recipe multiple times, but this is one of my favorite go-to recipes. Unlike traditional shortbread or sable cookies, I added an egg yolk for extra softness and cornstarch to create a more tender dough. There are really just three tips for success:

1.  Be very thorough when beating together the butter and sugar. The sugar crystals aerate the butter, creating a more flaky and tender cookie.
2. However, once you add the flour, do not over-mix or over-knead. Add the dry ingredient, and mix until it barely comes together in a dough. Handling the dough to much will develop the gluten in the flour, which will create a very tough cookie. 
3. Make sure the dough is very cold when you put it in the oven. The temperature difference of the hot oven and the cold dough will help create a buttery shortbread.

These cookies make a perfect last-minute holiday dessert platter; you can make cookies that look dainty and unique and different from each other, all from one dough. In fact, looking at these pictures, I think I might whip up another batch tomorrow for Christmas...

Have a wonderful holiday season! 

With love,
Caroline and Monica

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Shortbread, Three Ways
Click here for the printer-friendly recipe

Basic Shortbread Dough

Yields: 1 batch, or about 18 cookies (Quadruple this to make all three cookie varieties)

Ingredients
½ cup unsalted butter, softened
¼ cup granulated sugar
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 cup plus 2 tablespoon all-purpose flour
⅛ teaspoon salt

Directions
Whisk together the butter and sugar until it is a very pale, light, and fluffy, about 5 minutes with an electric mixer, longer if you’re doing it by hand. Whisk in the egg yolk and vanilla. 

Fold in the cornstarch, flour, and salt until just combined. Do not over mix.

Chill the dough for at least one hour, or up to overnight.

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Scottish Shortbread

Yields: 24 large cookies, or 36 small cookies

Ingredients
2 batches of basic shortbread dough
2 tablespoon granulated sugar

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Divide the cookie dough into 6 equal pieces. Press the dough into 6 mini 4 ½ -inch tart pans. If you don’t have tart pans, pat the dough into rounds about 4 ½ inches in diameter on a cookie sheet.

Prick the dough with a fork, and sprinkle with granulated sugar. Cut each round into 4 equal pieces, or 6 pieces for smaller cookies. Chill for about 30 minutes.

Place the tart pans onto a cookie sheet, and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until golden brown around the edges.

Let cool and serve.

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Lemon Curd Thumbprint Cookies

Yields: about 18 cookies

Ingredients
1 batch shortbread dough
½ cup sunflower seeds (can be substituted with finely chopped nuts)
⅓ cup lemon curd (can be substituted with jam)

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 F. Pour the sunflower seeds into a small bowl or plate.

Roll the dough into 1 ½ - inch balls. Roll the dough balls in the sunflower seeds and placed onto a greased cookie sheet, or a cookie sheet lined with foil. Place the cookies about 2 inches apart.

Use your thumb to indent  the center of the cookie, make a well for the curd filling later.

Bake the cookies for 15-18 minutes, or until slightly golden around the edges. Let cool.

Place about 1 teaspoon of lemon curd into the center of each cookie.

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Jam Sandwich Cookies

Yields: about 12 cookies

Ingredients
1 batch shortbread dough
⅓ cup jam

Directions
Place the dough onto a sheet of parchment paper, and pat into a flat disk. Cover with another piece of parchment paper, and roll the dough with a rolling pin until about ⅛ inch thick.

Place the dough onto a cookie sheet, and refrigerate for at least an hour.
Preheat the oven to 350 F

Using an (approximately) 3-inch heart cookie cutter, cut out 24 hearts from the dough. With half of the cookies, use a mini heart cookie cutter to punch out the centers. When you re-roll the scraps, follow the same process of rolling the dough between the parchment paper and refrigerate for about an hour.

Place the cookie on greased cookie sheets, or cookie sheets lined with parchment paper, about 1 inch apart.

Bake the cookies, using separate cookie sheets for ones with the centers and ones without the centers. Bake the ones with centers for 15-18 minutes, and the ones without the centers for 12-15 minutes, or until they are slightly golden around the edges. 

Let cool completely. Turn the cookies with the centers upside down, and spread about 1 teaspoon jam on each of them. Top with one of the cookies without centers.

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Lavender Sablé Cookies, Step by Step

These cookies are beautiful in their simplicity. They are humble and unpretentious, yet so delicious. Sablé comes from the French word for "sand," but I don't think that it really describes these cookies. They are soft, delicate, sweet without being overwhelmingly so. They are buttery and crumbly, almost melting in your mouth as you take a bite.

Recipes like this, for simple shortbread cookies, remind me how magical the baking really is, to transform a couple basic pantry ingredients into something delicious.

We haven't done step-by-step posts in a while, but I really wanted to capture the process of turning some flour, butter, and sugar into some amazing cookies. So here we go:

Grind together some sugar and lavender in a food processor or go the old-fashioned way with a mortar and pestle.

Whisk that together with some room temperature butter, and then the vanilla. Since there's so few ingredients, you really need some high-quality butter. (I used Kerrygold). Don't even THINK about using margarine or shortening.

Sift together the flour and salt over the butter mixture.

Gently fold in the flour. Don't overwork the dough, or else your cookies will become tough.

Turn the dough out onto a piece of wax paper or plastic wrap. Divide it in two evenly. Pat the dough into a log, and roll it in the wax paper. Do the same for the other log. Refrigerate it for at least two hours, or overnight.

The next day, roll the logs in granulated sugar, slice into 1/4-inch thick pieces, place on a parchment-lined cookie sheet, and bake. Alternately, you could roll them out and make cutout cookies.

I dressed my cookies up with some chocolate decorations. To make them, place a stencil over the cookies, and carefully paint over it with a small paintbrush dipped in melted chocolate. In retrospect, this would have worked better if I had made cutout cookies, so that the surface was completely flat.

Enjoy!
Caroline

One year ago: Perfect Couple Chocolate Chip Cookies
Two years ago: Chelsea Buns

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Lavender Sablé

Click here for the printer-friendly recipe.
Yields: 36-40 cookies
Adapted from the Pierre Herme Pastries cookbook

Ingredients
½ cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons dried culinary lavender*
1 cup butter, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour

For Assembly
⅓ cup granulated sugar
2 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (optional

Notes
* If you don’t have a food processor, you can add the lavender without grinding it, though the flavor won’t be as developed. Alternatively, you could leave out the lavender altogether, and make some delicious vanilla sables. 

**You could also refrigerate the dough in a disk, then roll it out to make cut-out cookies.

Directions
In a food processor (or with a mortar and and pestle), grind together the sugar and dried lavender. You don’t have to grind it to a powder, just enough to break up the pieces of lavender.

Whisk together the butter and lavender-sugar until light and fluffy. Whisk in the vanilla. Set aside.

Sift together the flour and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the butter mixture, until it just comes together. Do not overmix.
Turn the dough onto a piece of wax paper or plastic wrap. Shape the dough into two logs, about 2 inches wide, and wrap them in the paper. Roll the logs around slightly, to make them cylindrical.**

Refrigerate the dough for at least two hours, or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Unwrap the dough. Sprinkle about ⅓ cup of granulated sugar on a cutting board a tabletop, and roll the dough log in granulated sugar.

Slice the dough into about ¼-inch thick disks. Place onto a parchment-lined (or greased) cookie sheet, and bake for about 10-12 minutes, or until the cookies turn golden brown around the edges. Let cool completely.

If desired, decorate with melted chocolate. Place a stencil over the cookies, and with a small brush, paint over it with melted chocolate

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Linzer Heart Cookies

I'm going to really honest here for a second. I made these cookies for one reason, and one reason only: I needed to do a cutesy Valentine's Day post for today.

That being said, I do love these cookies. Flaky, buttery, sandwiched with sweet and tart rhubarb (yes, rhubarb!) jam, what's not to love? But I did make the cookies last week of all weekends for posting purposes. In fact, I even got up early so I could make them and take pictures while it was still light out, before I had to go to meetings in the afternoons. (And yes, I do need to set an alarm if I want to get up at 9:50 a.m. College life.)

It does make me wonder how many people make adorable pink baked goodies for Valentine's Day, and how much of it is food bloggers like me. I mean, I love seeing all the amazing Valentine and St. Patrick themed food on the web, but do people do it in real life?

But food blog existentialism aside, you really should make these cookies. If you're not into the cutesy Valentine thing, just change the shape of the cookies. This recipe is very similar to the shortbread I used for these Abbracci cookies, and they make wonderfully tender and delicious cookies.

The shortbread pairs wonderfully with the rhubarb jam I used because it has more sour notes than some other flavors, but you can use whatever jam  you want. (Or even Nutella! Hey, it's Valentine's Day, treat yourself!)

So enjoy! Whether or not you celebrate Valentine's Day, you should make these cookies (:

-Caroline

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Linzer Heart Cookies

Yields about 3 dozen sandwich cookies

Ingredients
For the Dough
2 ½ cups all purpose flour
¼ cup cornstarch
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
½ cup sugar
2 egg yolks, room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For Assembly
½ cup jam
¼ cup powdered sugar

Directions
Mix together the flour, cornstarch, and salt.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg yolks, and then the vanilla. Add the flour mixture and mix until just combined. Do not overmix.

Refrigerate the dough at least 1 hour, or overnight.

On a floured surface, roll out the dough to about half a centimeter thick. With a heart-shaped cookie cutter about 1 ½ inches wide (although any shape works!) to cut out the shapes. Place them on a greased baking sheet.

For half of the cookies, use a smaller cookie cutter to make a heart-shaped hole in the middle.

Gather up the scraps and re-roll the dough. Repeat steps 6 and 7. Continue this process until you run out of dough. Refrigerate the cookies for 1-2 hours.

Just before baking, preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake the cookies for 8-10 minutes, until the edges of the cookies are barely golden.Let the cookies cool completely.

Sift powdered sugar over all the cookies that have a hole in the middle. Microwave the jam for 15-20 seconds, to thin it out. Spread about ½ teaspoon of jam on the remaining cookies. Top with a cookie that has a hole. 

Abbracci Cookies

Last year I took a class called Interracial Literature; we read Othello, Absalom! Absalom!, lots of other cool and somewhat bizarre stories, analyzed conceptions of racial difference. Every class, my professor would bring us black and white Italian cookies, which we liked to call interracial cookies.

This particular variety is called Abbracci, which is Italian for "hug."

It's a simple shortbread cookie, a piece of chocolate dough intertwined with a piece of vanilla. Like they're hugging each other!

Shortbread is wonderfully easy to make, and if you're new to baking this is a great recipe to start with.

This cookie recipe also has slightly less sugar than most; you can increase it by another tablespoon or so, but I wouldn't recommend. The cookies I had in Italy were flaky, buttery, and had the perfect amount of sweetness, unlike their American counterparts, which tend to be too sweet. Along those lines, don't leave out the salt. I've found that salt adds a wonder complexity and depth of flavor to baked goods; they don't make things salty, but they help round out the sweetness.

Key techniques to making tender shortbread cookies is 1) not over-mixing the dough (especially when you're mixing in the cocoa and Nutella) and 2) refrigerating the dough before baking them.

There's nothing complicated or fancy about these cookies, aside from the cool shape. They're a wonderfully simple and delicious cookie, buttery and crumbly, perfect with a cup of tea and a good book.

Enjoy!
​Caroline

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Abbracci Cookies

Click here for the printer-friendly recipe. | Yields: 15 cookies

Ingredients
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened
⅓ cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
¼ cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 tablespoon Nutell

Directions
With an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light, pale, and fluffy. Whisk in the vanilla extract.

With a wooden spoon or spatula, stir in the salt. Add the flour and cornstarch and mix until just combined.

Remove about half of the dough from the bowl and set aside. To the remaining dough, add the cocoa powder and Nutella and mix until incorporated.

Divide the chocolate dough into 15 pieces. Do the same for the vanilla dough. With your hands, roll each piece of dough into a 2-inch log.

Join together one vanilla and one chocolate piece of dough with the ends overlapping, to form a circle. Do this for the remaining pieces of dough.

Place the cookies on a baking sheet and refrigerate for 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the cookies for 15-18 minutes. They will be barely golden around the edges.

Let cool and serve!