shortbread shortcut

One of the earliest recipes in The Kitchen Daughter is Grandma Damson's Scottish Shortbread. There are a kajillion recipes for shortbread, most of which work fine, but I made this one very simple on purpose. Two cups of flour, two sticks of butter, and a half-cup of sugar. That's all. Ginny does it the old-fashioned way, working the butter into the sugar by hand, and that's the way I'd usually done it as well.

Until last week.

 

Yep, that's a food processor. I was in a rush to crank out some cookies for book club, which I was hosting, and so I decided to use my stand mixer -- except in the close quarters of my kitchen, the stand mixer is currently behind the food processor, so I thought, Eh, I've heard people sometimes use the food processor for doughs and crusts, I guess I'll give it a shot.

Wow. What a shot it was.

 

I made only a half-batch -- so first I creamed a stick of cold butter (salted) with a quarter-cup of granulated sugar, then blitzed in a cup of flour, until the mixture resembled coarse crumbs.

 

Time elapsed? Like, nothing. Maybe literally two minutes. And then there was another time-saving discovery to make: if I patted the crust out on my synthetic cutting board and only rolled it lightly, instead of flouring a wooden board and rolling it thin, I didn't have to worry about the butter melting and making the dough hard to work. It came together in a flash. Pat pat pat:

 

Then just enough work with the rolling pin to smooth it out, and a quick series of punch-outs with the little round cutter:

 

Then onto the cookie sheet for baking:

 

And I may have baked them a tad too long, but they still came out so lovely.

 

They'd be fine on their own, but since I had so much dulce de leche left over from the previous round of alfajores, that's what happened to these too. Mmmm, sandwichy.

 

Maybe not quite as delicate as the dough made with cornstarch, but these came together so quickly with the combination of the simple recipe and the speediness of the food processor, I'll definitely be turning to this method whenever time is tight.

Comments

[Hypnotherapy London]

Yum! These look SO good, just need to figure out how to get them off the screen and into my hands ;)