Recipe Tips
What is the secret to good shortbread?
There are only three ingredients so they need to be right – this definitely isn’t the time to swap butter for margarine, or caster sugar for other sugars.
Once you’ve added the flour, go easy on the dough (feel free to beat the butter and sugar together really well though). Only mix as much as is needed to incorporate the flour into the butter mixture – this is best done by hand as it’s easy to over process the dough when using an electric mixer. The dough should be quite crumbly.
Does butter need to be cold for shortbread?
No, though if you don’t want to soften your butter, you should rub the butter into the other ingredients instead of mixing it into the sugar.
Why do you put fork holes in shortbread?
Creating little holes in the top of the shortbread helps any moisture escape from the dough so it cooks more evenly, this also helps create the very ‘short’ texture of the biscuits. In baking terms, 'short' means crumbly with a melt-in-the-mouth texture. It comes from using a high proportion of fat (or shortening) to flour and is also where shortcrust pastry gets its name.
Why do you put shortbread in the fridge before baking?
Chilling the dough before baking will help the shortbread keep their shape while cooking. In the oven, the dough will spread as the butter in the mixture melts, but baking it from chilled helps reduce this effect. It’s most important to do this if you are baking the shortbread in individual biscuits.
Do you cut shortbread when hot or cold?
Both work, it depends what you want to achieve. When using a biscuit cutter you always cut the dough before baking (and in this recipe the dough is cut into rectangles first), but there will always be a little spreading as the dough cooks.
You can also press the dough into an even layer in a lined or non-stick tin and score the top (using a round fluted tin and scoring into triangle pieces is another traditional shape). In this case you bake it, rescore the lines again while it’s hot (a bit deeper this time, or even cut them right through), then allow to cool completely before snapping the shortbread into pieces. This is how you get the crisp edges you see in commercial shortbreads. You may need to adjust the oven temperature if using this method (see below).
Why do some shortbread recipes use a low oven temperature and others use a high temperature?
This recipe is for baking individual biscuits, where you need the shape to set quickly in the oven to prevent the dough spreading too much as the butter melts. For this reason the recipe uses quite a high temperature.
When baking the dough in a slab pressed into the bottom of a tin, there is no risk of the dough spreading, so you can use a much lower oven temperature (160C/140C Fan/Gas 3) which results in a paler coloured shortbread. However, you will need to extend the cook time by about 10–15 minutes, depending on the thickness of your dough.
How do you know when shortbread is ready?
It will be a pale golden-brown colour.
