Flour, sugar, butter, salt. Only four ingredients but an infinite number of wrong combinations. On the surface, a completely simple recipe: the devil is in the details, as the old saying goes.
Today I continue my quest to create the delicious (or at a minimum, fairly edible) shortbread cookie. I have generously titled this recap "Chapter 15," although I feel certain I have baked (and trashed) more like 25 or so batches of shortbread in the past year. No more random attempts! Starting today, I will be scientifically chronicling my failures---if I eliminate all the recipes that aren't shortbread, won't I eventually find the recipe that is?
For today's version, I have turned to the book Tea with Alice. This recipe is allegedly from the Liddell family, whose daughter was of course the "Wonderland" Alice---an expert on Mad Hatters, tea parties in general, and thus shortbread.
And so we begin:2 1/2 cups of flour + 2 sticks butter + 1 tsp salt + 1/3 cup confectioner's sugar. Rolled immediately after mixing without chilling the dough at all. Into the 275-degree convection oven for 30 minutes, cooled for an additional 10 minutes.
The taste is not bad: plain (as shortbread should be, I think), with a hint of salt. Texture is a little off though: when I bite it, breaks up in a powdery mess. Luckily they are pretty small so maybe the best choice here is to eat them whole (the Queen would not approve). Perhaps they will continue to harden up and then they might be bite-able. Appearance is certainly not a success though: they remained completely 'white' instead of browning on the edges or the bottom, giving them a not-cooked look. I sprinkled half the batch with sugar, a clear violation of shortbread guidelines, in the hopes that the extra sweetness might tempt the kids at least. The other half is the standard plain.
Why is this so difficult?! 19th-century little girls in their play kitchens could make shortbread. Pilgrims with wood-burning open hearths could make shortbread. Scottish women, Girl Scouts, Lorna Doone---they all could make shortbread. I have high-tech baking gear and access to the finest ingredients (free-range cows wail and moan over the amount of their creamy butter I have ruined with my baking), but I still can't make decent shortbread!
"Why are you even trying this?" my husband recently asked. "It's the worst cookie on earth. Shortbread may have been good back when molasses and ginger were popular dessert flavors, but it's a little outdated for the current era." His version of an acceptable "cookie" is something with chocolate, nuts, frosting, Oreo crumbs, and shards of M & M.
So the final result is...awaiting further review. I won't toss it in the trash just yet, preferring to wait for the family units to weigh in with their opinions later. The dogs, of course, enjoy ALL my shortbreads ("They're just like our Milk Bones, Ma'am!") so at least a few won't go to waste regardless.