Scotch Shortbread

Hello and welcome to my blog, Sugar and Shimmer! I've often thought of starting a blog where I could have a place to share my ideas, trials and successes with baking and crafting. That's what this blog aims to be: I'll share with you the projects I'm working on as well as some of the things I've made in the past, from random rainy day crafts to some of my DIY wedding projects. I hope you'll find inspiration that you can use and you'll enjoy seeing my creations.

For my first post I'm going to share a baking experience from this past weekend. My husband and I were having a lazy Sunday at home and so I decided to let him pick a recipe for me to make. I gave him the 150 Delicious Squares book (one of the wonderful Company's Coming series) and he chose Scotch Shortbread. I assume it would be a copyright infringement to post the entire recipe but, if you're interested, someone else beat me to it here.

I've never made shortbread before but with only three ingredients (butter, flour and icing sugar), I figured that it wouldn't be too difficult. It definitely wasn't!

All you had to do was combine the ingredients in a bowl and work them together with your hands until they formed a ball. I will confess that I love any recipe that instructs me to use my hands. They are so much easier to work with than anything else and clean up is a snap!

Once you've got your dough, you simply press it into the pan, poke it through with a fork all over and then pop it in the oven. Not the best summer recipe because it bakes for 50 minutes which is a long time to have the oven on in an already overheated house but the results were well worth it.

Here is what the finished product looked like. I cut the shortbread into bite-size pieces because it turned out wonderfully flaky (read: crumbly and messy) but you could easily turn it into bars if you preferred. I also thought it could be neat to bake it in a round cake pan and then cut it into wedges for a different sort of presentation.

And that's it for my first entry. Give the recipe a try yourself and hit the comments to let me know how it turned out. Or feel free to give me suggestions for what I can make next, or just let me know that you're reading.

More later this week as I also made Truffle Slices on Sunday!