Scottish Shortbread

To kick off the baking, we’re going to visit the first Scottish Shortbread recipe I ever used. So to my wrinkled, stained and bookmarked copy of The All New Good Housekeeping Cookbook we go.

This recipe is supposed to be baked in 2 8” round pans. Once baked and cooled, you cut each round into 16 wedges.  I’ve never done this. (Points to General Leia Organa tattoo on my back) This is where the rebellion begins.
We start with the recipe as printed:

1.5 cups cake flour (not self-rising)

1.5 cups all purpose flour

.5 cup sugar

.25 tsp salt

1.5 cups (3 sticks) butter cut up and softened

I grew up in a house where there was one type of flour – white and bleached all purpose flour. (This can also be seen as commentary on my mother’s culinary skills and lack of creativity.) Cakes were more often than not from a Duncan Hines box. We didn’t have cake flour or whole wheat flour. She took cake decorating classes when I was a kid, and she could frost those Superman and Strawberry Shortcake shaped cakes like nobody’s business. While I now keep several types of glutinous and gluten free flours in my kitchen, I still have never purchased cake flour. *shrug*

For today’s blog I made half a batch thusly:

1.5 cups all purpose flour

.25 cup white granulated sugar (which I presume is what our friends at Good Housekeeping intended, but you will learn this isn’t my usual)

Just under .25 tsp salt because I was too lazy to find my ⅛ tsp

1.5 sticks of butter at room temperature

I rolled out the dough with more white flour and cut with my grandmother’s antique (?) Set of 12 Cookie and Sandwich Cutters.  My stepmom has the same set from her mother. I got 70 small round cookies from this half batch of dough.

I baked at 325 F for 10 minutes. The cookie is softer than a sugar cookie. It has a quality to it that I can only describe as “made with granulated sugar”. Gluten is a binding agent. If you’ve eaten GF baked goods without a good binder, you know the quality that is missing.  This version with granulated sugar and regular white flour to me seems to have extra binding. If I baked for longer these would not be chewy cookies.

This Scottish Shortbread (used as a rolled and cut cookie) makes an excellent replacement for sugar cookies, though softer. So cookie cutters with antlers or fun bends in the shapes may not hold up as well as a more solid (need to dunk in a beverage) cookie. I like to make these for holidays and potlucks with coloured sugars and sprinkles.