I had a really shitty day yesterday. It’s May and that means Mental Health Awareness month. What I’m coming to realize is that I’ve not been taking care of myself since all of this lock down started to happen. We went to the grocery store recently for supplies. I picked up a sleeve of Lotus Biscoff cookies. They’re one of my favorites. If they have them on the flights that I’m on that’s what I go for. That and a cup of coffee to dunk them in. They’re great cookies. We were on a flight recently, flying first class, and they had the cookies but weren’t giving them out in first class. I saw the flight attendant hording a pack for herself. She was a bit rude but that’s besides the point. I shared some of these cookies on a flight with my mom when we were heading to a family wedding. The Witch knows how much I like them and we split them on our flights.

Recently I was thinking about making something I’d never made before. I’m not sure where the idea popped up anymore, but I wanted to make shortbread. I like the taste. The buttery flavor with a light firm crunch. Lorna Doone cookies were some of my favorites. I could eat an entire sleeve and not think twice. Sometimes I’d dip them in frosting. Don’t judge me.

Anyway I did what I normally do when trying to figure things out. I checked some recipes in other cookbooks. Only this time that’s not what I did. I wanted to see what I could learn about shortbread first. I did a bit of research and found that traditional Scottish shortbread is a 1, 2, 3 ratio of sugar, butter, and flour. That seems easy enough. In all honesty that’s really all you need to make a shortbread. You don’t need to add anything else. You don’t need eggs, a leavening agent (like baking powder or soda), or even vanilla. Anything you add after sugar, butter, and flour is really where you can get creative.

At this point I had the basic understanding of what shortbread is. Now I needed to figure out how to bake it and what to do. This is where I did my normal dig through cookbooks or internet recipes and see what people are doing. I found a lot of recipes where no one was really following in 1, 2, 3 ratio. I decided that for mine I’d stick to that just to see how it worked out. Why ruin a good thing. I wanted to use powdered sugar to keep more of a light texture as I wasn’t sure if it’d be overly grainy/gritty if I stuck with granulated sugar.

Now I needed to know baking temperatures and timing. Well guess what. That’s all over the place too. Wonderful. Temperatures were anywhere from 300 - 350 and times from 10 minutes, doesn’t seem like enough, to 40 minutes which to me seems like it’d be guaranteed burning of the shortbread. Ok, screw it 350 degrees it is. I’ll start out with 25 minutes and just go from there. It turned out to be around 33 minutes is what worked for this recipe.

Now how am I going to shape these cookies? Everyone had their own ideas on that too. Some people made a log out of the dough, refrigerated it, and then sliced it. Some people refrigerated it, rolled it out, and then cut other. Others put it in a cake pan or other baking pan and then sliced it after it came out of the oven. Seems easy enough, and kills the waiting for it to chill phase. Bingo here we go. Also this gives me the ability to use my new Nordic Ware 9 inch cake pans.

I prepped the cake pans with some parchment paper, using a sneaky trick I’d seen before to cut a circle. It was close but slightly off. Take the parchment sheet large enough to cover the pan. Fold it in half like a hot dog. Then fold that in half like a hamburger. Now if you line it up so your double fold is in the center you can cut off the excess by following the contour of the pan. This left it a bit larger that the bottom of the pan, but it worked surprisingly well. This would turn out to be a waste for me anyway as when I tried to spread out the dough it would stick and move too much. I ended up just spraying down the pan and putting the dough in directly. It didn’t stick at all when baking so it worked out great. It was still easy to get out.

Anyway I decided that I wanted to add some Biscoff cookies to this for some pizazz. I popped in half a teaspoon of cinnamon to round out the flavor across the whole shortbread. Then I crushed up 5-6 Biscoff cookies fearing too many would dry out the dough and ruin it. This amount turned out to be perfect. The little bit of cinnamon tied the whole thing together, didn’t over power the Biscoff, and still let the butter shine through. Over all this was very successful on my first try. I did have a few hiccups along the way like when I hit the speed lever instead of the lock lever on the mixer right after I’d added half of the flour to the butter. I spent a few minutes cleaning up flour after that. I also forgot to take half of the pictures needed to really get a step by step like most of my other recipes. Sorry about that. Yesterday was a mess but these worked perfectly.

Stay safe out there.

Ingredients

• 1/2 Cup powdered sugar

• 1 Cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter - room temp *important

• 1 1/2 Cups AP flour

• 1 teaspoon of vanilla

• 1/2 teaspoon of salt

• 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

• 5-6 Biscoff cookies (crushed)

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 Degrees

2. Add the room temp butter to the bowl of your stand mixer, with a paddle attachment, and whip for 1-2 minutes

3. Slowly mix in the powdered sugar

4. Add the vanilla and mix

5. Meanwhile in another bowl whisk together the flour, cinnamon, and salt

6. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture until combined

7. Crush the Biscoff cookies and add to the dough. Mix gently until incorporated

8. Spray a 9 inch cake pan with cooking spray

9. Move the dough to the pan and use an offset spatula to spread out the dough evenly

10. Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes until slightly browned

11. Remove from the oven and immediately slice before they cool

12. Let cool in the pan on a wire rack

13. Remove the slices and enjoy with coffee, tea, or milk

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