Shortbread a for 6 Hand-Rolled Biscuits – Both a Good Quantity and a Quick Means of Testing Flavour Variations – Use 15G Sugar, 30G Butter and 45G Flour
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CAKES & BISCUITS CAKES LEEWAY Shortbread A For 6 hand-rolled biscuits – both a good quantity and a quick means of testing flavour variations – use 15g sugar, 30g butter and 45g flour. To make enough for a 20–22 cm square tin, use 75g sugar, 150g butter and 225g flour. The ratio for shortbread is well known – 1:2:3. Useful as long B You might think of Viennese whirls as a variation of as you remember which number applies to which ingredient. shortbread, made with icing sugar and a high proportion I rely on a mnemonic, Shortbread Biscuit Formula. Sugar, Butter, Cake Angel of butter to flour. This makes a soft paste that can be Flour. Don’t forget the pinch of salt as you mix it up. Classic and piped into swirly rosettes and fingers. C memorable as it may be, the 1:2:3 ratio is not set in stone. James Some cooks deploy the rubbing-in method for shortbread. Martin goes for a 1:6:7 ratio – the butteriest I’ve come across. It’s an option if your butter is hard, but you will almost Genoise certainly need to add some egg yolk to bring the dough together. For a 17– 20 cm round, or about 20 fingers A D Substitute a quarter to a third of the flour for the same weight of rice flour, cornflour, semolina or potato starch. INGREDIENTS Cake Sponge Butter These gluten-free flours will lend an even shorter texture. 50g sugar B E Heston Blumenthal adds a little baking power to his 100g unsalted butter, softened slightly C shortbread, and also includes egg yolk, which contains 150g plain flour D the liquid necessary to activate the powder. Pinch of salt 1 egg yolk – optional E Gingerbread Gingerbread 1 Cream the sugar and butter until combined. The butter should be cool and soft when you start, not melting, as this will affect the texture of the finished biscuit. Biscuits 2 Add the flour and salt, stirring with a spoon to form a dough. If the dough is too dry, an egg yolk will bring it together, although for the shortest texture, it might be better to hold some of the flour Shortbread back initially. 3 Either press the dough into a greased 17– 20 cm round tin, then score and prick it as attractively as possible, or roll out the dough to a thickness of 4 – 5mm and cut into shapes. Or use your hands to roll it into walnut-size balls, placing them on a greased baking sheet and pressing their tops with the tines of a fork. Rest in the fridge for 30 minutes if you have time. 4 Bake at 160°C for about 45 minutes for a round, 10 – 20 minutes for individual biscuits, depending on how thick they are. Some cook their shortbread for 15 – 20 minutes at 180°C, in common with most standard biscuit recipes, but a longer bake will give a toastier flavour, and the surface a distinctly un-Scottish tan. 5 Store in an airtight container. Shortbread should keep for a week, even two. 356 357 Shortbread Flavours & Variations & BISCUITS CAKES and try cultured butter. Most butter sold in the UK is of the sweet cream variety, but some smaller dairies are starting to sell the sourer, more complex cultured butter online. Or you can seek out a Normandy BLACK PEPPER AOP butter on the premium-priced shelves of your supermarket. Salt is a must in shortbread, but rest easy if you have matching Or make your own with double cream, buttermilk and a stand mixer. grinders and used the wrong one. Leiths give a recipe for black pepper The process involves washing the butter solids from the butterfat, shortbread, stipulating 1 tsp peppercorns crushed in a mortar for a sensory experience that merits immediate inclusion on your bucket Angel Cake Cake Angel a dough made with 55g sugar, 110g butter and 165g flour. list: twenty fats to wash before you die. CHICKPEA CUSTARD Pakora, socca or dhokla might prompt you to file chickpea flour under In English Food, Jane Grigson calls custard powder ‘one of our minor ‘savoury’, but biscuits made with besan argue otherwise. What they Genoise national tragedies’. I’d like to have heard her thoughts on the recipe have in common with their savoury counterparts is their deep, golden for custard powder found, fittingly enough, between curry powder and colour, which is suggestive, if not indicative, of a richer butteriness cyanide of potassium in The Pharmaceutist’s and Druggist’s Practical than a regular biscuit made with white wheat flour. The real gain is Cake Sponge Butter Receipt Book published in 1865. A concoction of sago flour, turmeric, textural: they’re so light and melting that the addition of fruit or nuts bitter almond powder and oil of cassia – like cinnamon, but harsher – would only detract from them. Spices are another matter. Cardamom is stirred into sweetened milk. Alfred Bird’s powder of cornflour, and nutmeg, as used in the Indian biscuit nan khatai, are particularly yellow colouring and vanilla is ambrosial by comparison. (Bird invented popular during Diwali. Afghan nan-e nodhokchi are flavoured with rose his eggless custard powder for his wife, who suffered from an egg and cardamom. The besan flavour is quite strong and, if you haven’t allergy. As love tokens go, it makes a change from flowers or frilly tried it in sweet biscuits before, you might start by mixing it into plain Gingerbread underpants.) Custard shortbread is made by substituting custard flour, as suggested for cornflour or semolina at D under Leeway. powder for a third of the flour in our starting point. For a more richly custardy effect, add vanilla extract and a touch of egg-yellow food CHOCOLATE colouring or annatto. In the UK, it takes a minimum of 3% fat-free dry cocoa solids to qualify Biscuits as a chocolate biscuit (in case you were thinking of applying). Biscuits DATE that fall short of the minimum can only be called chocolate-flavoured. Date slices: up your street if you like the crumbly bit of crumble more I have yet to calculate whether Granny Boyd’s biscuits, from Nigella than the fruit. Date is the classic, but any dried fruit, or even a very Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess, make the grade, but I don’t Shortbread thick compote, can be used. Make sure it’s thick, though – a watery fruit care: this is my favourite chocolate biscuit dough by a country mile. mixture will seep into the bottom layer of crumble and make your slice The ratio is more or less in line with our starting point for shortbread; too soggy to handle. The crumble is made to shortbread proportions, there’s just a little less flour than you might expect, as the cocoa takes splitting the standard 3 parts flour between equal weights of flour and the place of some of it. Use the time you haven’t wasted calculating the oats. Rub or process 200g unsalted butter into 150g plain flour, then dry-cocoa-solids content raiding the supermarket for some really good stir in 150g porridge oats, 100g sugar and a few pinches of salt. Simmer vanilla ice cream, the indispensable accompaniment. Lawson calls 400g stoned dates with 250 ml water until the excess water evaporates, for 125g caster sugar, 250g unsalted butter, 300g self-raising flour and then chop them roughly. Press half the crumble mix into a 23 cm square 30g cocoa powder. Make as per the starting point and bake for 5 minutes baking dish, spreading it out evenly, followed by the dates, then the at 170°C, then reduce the heat to 150°C for a further 15 minutes. other half of the crumble. Bake at 160°C for 40 minutes. Mark into slices while still warm from the oven, then cut and transfer to a rack when CULTURED BUTTER cool enough to handle. Only a swivel-eyed serial killer would eat butter by the spoonful. Clotted cream is about as fatty as social norms allow. To comply with its PDO HONEY & GHEE (Protected Designation of Origin), Cornish clotted cream must contain Honey is never better than when it’s paired with butter, preferably a minimum of 55 per cent butterfat. (Most British butters contain salted. It was after making the beghrir pancakes on page 134, dripping 86 per cent.) I came across a recipe for clotted cream shortbread in with honeyed butter, that I picked up a tube of honey shortbread which half the butter weight in the 1:2:3 formula was replaced with in Fortnum & Mason. On a return visit, I found that they no longer clotted cream. They were lovely, but questionably named, as the water sold them, and ended up making my own approximation. It’s possible content in the cream compromised the shortness. Butter is better. to straight-swap honey for sugar in shortbread, but note that they For a deeper dairy flavour, follow Michael Ruhlman’s recommendation have very different water contents – white sugar contains as little as 358 359 .