The Best Shortbread Recipe

Hey y'all!

Thank you for the response to Monday's RMM post. This may seem like a total 180 degree turn, but I think the world may need a little extra sugar at the moment.

This is one of my favorite and also least favorite recipes to make. I am not joking when I tell you that the first time I made it I cried three separate times. Shortbread was almost my kryptonite. (As it turns out my kryptonite is actually macaroons, but I will best them one day).

Anyways, this shortbread recipe is fairly simple:

2 cups of butter, softened

1 cup of brown sugar, packed

4-5 cups of flour.

Preheat your oven to 325 Fahrenheit, and cream the butter and brown sugar together in a mixing bowl. When it's light and fluffy start adding your flour a cup at a time, but stop at around 3.5-3.75 cups. Turn your mixture out onto a surface already coated in flour and start kneading, and add bits of your remaining flour at a time to form a nice dough.

Once you have a nice dough ball, roll it out on your floured surface - and don't forget to flour your rolling pin as well! Try to get it to about a half inch thickness, and then you can cut out little strips like classic short bread cookies, or circles, or you can take a leaf out of my book and use a crown shaped cookie cutter! (I made them last summer like that and gave them out as gifts at my international pageant and they were the cutest things and so delicious. I even painted them with glitter).

Poke your cookies with a fork in a couple places to keep your shortbread from rising while in the oven, and bake your cookies for 20-25 minutes (or until they're a nice pale gold-brown color). This also gives them that nice hole-y look that comes to mind a lot of times when thinking of shortbread.

What frustrated me the first time I made this recipe is how short the dough is. Which basically means that I was working it more like a bread dough and it was falling apart and sticking to everything because I didn't flour things enough and ugh. It was miserable. But also short is literally in the name so I was just being a big baby and now I am less scared of the dough! I'm pretty sure I started baking them around 8pm and didn't finish for a few hours the first time though... yikes. I took many mental breaks. Anyways, just be sure to flour your surfaces well, is you feel like things are just drying out way too much dampen your fingers a tiny bit with water and try to work that into the dough bit by bit. And above all else remember that if worse comes to worse just cut off the rough edges and shove it in the oven and hope for the best! It will taste great just the same.

Thank y'all for reading this post and let me know in the comments if you try this recipe or if you've tried making short bread in the past and how it went for you!