Making Scottish Shortbread

There were few times when we went to local supermarket, my husband pointed Scottish Shortbread for me to make. I just replied him with "OK" many times but never actually realized his suggestion until last weekend. I ran out of idea what cookies or cake to bake, so I started searching for Scottish Shortbread recipes in the internet.

After reading the reviews, I decided to go ahead with the Scottish Shortbread recipe from this source. In the beginning, I could not believe that making basic shortbread would only need three ingredients for the dough. Since I had the entire required ingredients ready in my kitchen, I gave this recipe a shot. However, I only made 1/3 of the stated ingredients from the original recipe to test this recipe and added a bit of milk powder and vanilla extract to the dough.

Here's my shortbread recipe version.

My first trial of Scottish Shortbread.

Scottish Shortbread

Ingredients:

• 150gr Unsalted butter, in room temperature
• 70gr Brown sugar (some people say, this is irreplaceable with white sugar)
• 200gr Flour
• 1 tbsp Milk powder
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla powder/extract

Tutorials:

1. Cream butter, vanilla powder/extract and sugar by using electric mixer.
2. Add 150gr of flour and milk powder to the mixture. Mix well by using rubber spatula.
3. Sprinkle kneading board with the remaining flour. Knead the dough for 5 minutes with the remaining flour until it forms soft dough. Make a ball from the dough and cover it with plastic wrap. Refrigerate the dough for 1 hour or overnight.
4. Roll the dough to 1/2 inch thickness and cut them into 3x1 inch strips. Prick the cut shortbread dough with fork and place them on a pan already lined with ungreased parchment paper.
5. Sprinkle the shortbread with a little bit of brown sugar before baking (optional).
6. Bake the shortbread in a preheated oven (at 150 degree Celcius) for 20-25 minutes.

My husband and I think that the shortbread I baked tasted more like plain butter cookies but they had really crumbly, almost melt-in-mouth, texture when eaten. My mistake in my first trial here was probably the final presentation of the shortbread I made. I should have rolled the shortbread dough a bit thicker so my shortbread would look more like shortbread fingers than square butter cookies.

** Get the printable version of this recipe HERE.