Traditional Scottish Shortbread - and Not So Traditional !

This attempt was inspired by Kay. Kay informed me yesterday that she was buying our new Fleur-De-Lys silicone mould to make cakes or cookies for a visitor who is a keen follower of New Orleans Superbowl. Seemingly, the Fleur De Lys is the emblem for the New Orleans Saints.

I hope I've got that right !

Well - I've had super success making soap with this mould. The soaps come out truly beautiful. I haven't had time to play with cakes / biscuits using it to date.... but Kay sort of inspired me to have a go.

With a yearning for home, reckoned it was time to make some Shortbread to my Granny's recipe. I then also decided to give it my own new twist .....

It worked some ways better than I imagined - though slightly different to how I thought it might turn out.

Traditional Shortbread

100g / 4 oz of plain flour
50g / 2 oz of cornflour (or rice flour)
100g / 4 oz of butter
50g / 2 oz of caster sugar

I do usually double this recipe......

Sift the flours into a bowl. Cut the butter and rub into the flour with your fingertips. Add the sugar and knead to combine. Either press into a shortbread tin, or roll into a cylinder and cut off 1/2 thick circles. Works fine stamping out with cookie cutters too - but don't forget these will be quite fragile when cooked.

Place on your silicone baking sheet and cook for 30 mins in a cool oven - 150deg C / 300deg F or until firm to the touch. Dust with more caster sugar when still warm

My Not So Traditional Shortbread

90g plain flour
30g cornflour
40g cocoa powder
100g butter
50g caster sugar

cook as above for traditional recipe - may need a few extra minutes.

Here is a batch of each dough. Do not touch one and then the other without first washing hands - or the normal dough will look rather muddy !

First of all, I pinched off pieces of the chocolate shortbread dough and filled the inset embossed part. I then used the normal dough to fill the rest of the cell. After doing 5 like this, I then swapped to using normal dough for the insets and filled the rest of the cell with chocolate dough.

The dough does rise slightly. I wasn't expecting it to behave as it did. The chocolate dough sank a bit in the middle and rose more on the outside. If making these again, I'd 3/4 fill the cells rather than totally filling them. As these were rather thick, they took just over 40mins to cook.

I did have to leave them to cool until just warm before turning out. Finished photo as below..

With the remaining dough, I rolled one normal long sausage shape and two chocolate ones. Slightly squashed them together and then rolled flat until 1/2" / 12mm thick. Then, I cut this into eight pieces.

These were baked at 160deg C for 30mins on a silicone baking sheet. They tasted absolutely divine with a serious chocolate hit but the crumbliness of good shortbread