Mia's Bakes: Scottish Shortbread

It's been a while since I last baked, and last week while on leave, I randomly decided to raid my baking ingredient cabinet to find what existing ingredients I have on hand to do some baking. 

And I got some AP flour, salted butter, and icing sugar. 

So I guess, why not? Let's make a 3-ingredient Scottish Shortbread!

And to make this shortbread biscuit, we will need:

340g AP Flour

225g Salted Butter 

(or unsalted butter with 1 tsp. salt)

125g Icing sugar

(you may substitute it with caster sugar)

It's so easy, right? These 3 ingredients are so common, I'm sure most of you have them lying in your cabinet and fridge right now. 

So let's get started with the baking! :)

As usual, we will need to cream the butter and sugar together until it turns pale and creamy. This process is really important and it's impossible to overbeat your mixture at this stage, so just full-blast your beaters for a good 2 to 3 minutes. 

Then, sift in your flour and fold until it resembles chunky bits of moist sand. 

Then, pour out your mixture onto your clean table top and knead through them once. Using the meaty part of your palm right below your thumb, just press through on each portion of the batter ONCE. Take care to not over-knead the dough or you will not get the crumbly texture of shortbread. 

After kneading through, gather all the dough bits together and wrap it up in a piece of cling wrap.

And then, place the dough in the fridge for 1 hour to rest.

After 1 hour, remove the chilled dough from the fridge and give it a few light kneads before rolling it out roughly into a rectangular shape with a rolling pin till about slightly more than 0.5 inch thick, or as you preferred. Kneading the dough helps to warm the dough up and soften it so that it wouldn't crack too much as you roll. 

Then, using a dough cutter (or just any knife), slice the dough into rectangular strips. I cut mine into roughly 2 by 6 cm, but you can cut them however big or small as you like. Then, using a fork, poke each strip 4 times (or more if you cut them into big strips) to keep them from rising while baking.

Then bake them at 150 degree Celsius for 30 to 35 minutes, until the edges brown slightly. 

And then, it's very important to go back to the freshly baked shortbread and re-cut them with your cutter once they're out of the oven, and then leaving them to cool completely. 

Tadaa, my freshly baked Scottish Shortbread! It's a pity I have no chocolate at home, if not I will definitely melt some chocolate down to dip these shortbread in. 

These shortbread are full of buttery fragrance, densely packed and crumbly. Really addictive if you're a butter cookie fan. Plus, they really easy to make so go grab your ingredients and start baking some for yourself right away! 

Till then,

Mia Foo