Shortbread (How to Make)

Medford. Crud, I'm still only in Medford. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the dorms.

I wanted a kitchen and for my sins they gave me one.

Actually, I'm having a fine time. Drove down home for Xmas and immediately made with the baking. I've made four batches of chocolate almond biscotti, one batch of chocolate mint cookies (except we couldn't find mint chips so I used toffee), one batch of peanut butter cookies and two batches of shortbread.

That's really eight batches of biscotti and four batches of shortbread if you stop to think about it; most of the cookie recipes in my recipe box are at the very least doubled from the original. I'm a firm believer that anything worth doing is worth doing well, and anything worth baking is worth baking in massive, table-breaking quantities.

We have a little TV in the kitchen that's a slave to the big TV in the living room. Boy, this is the life. We rented a bunch of Bogart movies and a couple of '80s comedies (I'm still trying to catch up on my zeitgeist), so I can either sit in the living room and vegetate or bustle about the kitchen and make cookies and enjoy fine television at the same time.

That and a fast Internet connection is really all I want out of life. I look good in an apron. As long as your definition of "good" includes the term "maternal" and/or "German." Baking brings out the red in my cheeks.

The sudden influx of baked goods has caught the household by surprise. We're nearly out of butter and soon, with my plans to make krumkake and more biscotti before I leave on Thursday, we'll be out of containers for the cookies as well.

Mom's been taking cookies to work - we've learned long ago that nurses are an efficient method of baked goods disposal. Nurses can skeletonize a chocolate cream pie in under five minutes, and you'd best count your fingers after they're done. If you're ever in the hospital, you can tame a nurse by offering her small pieces of chocolate. Eventually she'll come close enough to eat out of your hand, and give you as much damn morphine as you want.

One of the nurses here really likes my shortbread, in the sense that zombies really like the flesh of the living. When I was at home before, Mom would periodically pass along reminders from her friend that it was time to make more shortbread. If I hadn't been so easy to set off on a baking spree, I imagine she would have started phoning in a disguised voice, advising me that my life was in danger if more shortbread did not make it to the hospital. She really, really liked it.

This always made me feel a little bad, because shortbread is incredibly easy to make. Other than pie, it's the only baked item I feel certain that I could make from memory. It has four ingredients, only one of which is at all odd, and doesn't require a mixer or any special tools. Small children have made this shortbread. Bachelors have made this shortbread. Loyal readers, all six of you can make this shortbread.

I suppose the recipe would help:


...
Scottish Shortbread

1¼ cups flour
3 TBSP cornstarch
¼ cup sugar
½ cup room-temperature butter


Preheat the oven to 325º. In a somewhat large bowl, stir everything but the butter. You can stir it with your hand, if you like. Dump the stick of butter in and mash it all around with your fingers, rubbing the butter into the flour. It's fun!

I should probably have mentioned that you need to wash your hands. You need to wash your hands every time you make food, of course, but you really need to do it before you make shortbread, unless you're going to be feeding people who readily eat Play-Dough.

Anyway, after the mixture is crumbly and there aren't any blatant globs of butter, find an 8" to 9" diameter pan. Pour in the mixture and pat it down so it's all one piece. If you can't find an appropriately-sized pan, you can use an inappropriately-sized pan. Or a couple of them. As long as the dough ends up a little under half an inch deep.

You can make designs in the shortcake by pressing a fork onto it artistically, or you can just shove it into the oven as is. It should take about 40 minutes, though you'll probably want to check it at 30, just in case. Take it out when the edges are a light golden brown.

Cut it into wedges (or whatever shape is appropriate) while it's still in the pan. If you let it cool first, it'll break into a million pieces when you cut it. Even if you cut it now, while it's hot, it'll probably still break when you lift it piece-by-piece onto a nice plate. This problem can be solved three ways:

1. Do not remove it from the pan until someone's going to eat it. It won't look as nice, but it'll stay in wedges.

2. Bake several pans of shortbread at once. Cut into equal-sized pieces, attempt to lift the pieces onto plates. Consolidate the unbroken wedges into one or two perfect and unblemished circles of shortbread.

3. Attempt to lift wedges whole with fork. Fail. Refuse to give a damn, place wedges on a plate or in a regular cookie container.

Bonus cookie solution 3.5: Eat the entire shortbread, standing over the sink. Die alone and unloved.

The recipe is easily doubled, tripled or quadrupled. In a quadruple batch it's 3/4 cup of cornstarch, unless you actually want to measure 12 tablespoons. You can probably octuple the recipe as well, but at that point it'd be hard to mix the ingredients well. You'd need a really big bowl, too.

...

It's not an impressive recipe, but people like sugar and butter and they get in trouble for just eating either with a spoon. Shortbread is the simplest step up.