Shortbread Cookies & a reason to celebrate

The Christmas celebration mood is on and I am just enjoying it to the core. I have been getting a lot of baked goodies from friends and craving for more and more :) That too after the Mega Chennai Bloggers meet, I have got a lot of energy to bake and celebrate :)

I also have one more reason to celebrate the day. :) My blog, Fourth Sense Cooking has crossed 100000 hits :)

I would take this occasion to send a lakh thanks to all the visitors of my blog, if not for you all I would have never tried to cook or blog :P I swear! The encouragement in the form of comments, hits, mails and calls make me so cheerful about the whole thing and I enjoy presenting it for you all :) Keep lending me your support and wishes always :)

So here is my second post of Christmas treats - The simple and ever versatile shortbread cookies :)

Ingredients:

All purpose flour(Maida) - 1 1/2 cups
Corn flour - 1/2 cup
Butter - 1 cup (Room temperature)
Powdered sugar - 1/2 cup
Salt - a pinch
Vanilla essence / Almond essence - 1 tsp

Method:

Sieve the dry ingredients(All purpose flour, corn flour and salt) and keep it aside.

In a bowl of your electric mixer, beat the butter until smooth and creamy for about a minute. Add the sugar to it and beat until smooth and creamy. Pour the vanilla extract and beat just once. Gently stir in the flour mixture just until incorporated. Now flatten the dough into a smooth disk shape with your hand and wrap in plastic wrap. Chill the dough for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 180°C.

Sprinkle some All purpose flour on your working surface and roll out the dough into a 1/4 inch thick rectangle.

Use your cookie cutters to cut out shapes.

Place the cut out cookies on a baking tray and bake for 12-15 minutes, watching closely so that they don’t get too brown. 13 minutes did it perfectly in my convection oven.

Let the cookies cool on wire rack for a while. Initially the cookies might feel a little soft and crumbly to touch but it will harden as it cools down.

Store in air tight containers.

Light, crumbly and melt in the mouth short bread cookies is ready to eat :)

Enjoy making and happy eating :)

For the Tree:

Since I don't have various sizes of star cutters, I cut out different sizes of stars on a paper and placed it over the rolled dough and cut along the outline with a knife.

Mix one tsp of icing sugar with just few drops of water to make it into a paste.

Once you get around 10 gradually increasing sizes of star cookies, just apply a few drops of the sugar paste on the largest star cookie and stick the subsequent sized cookie on top of it. Go on doing the same until you complete stacking the tree :)

Decorate the tree as you like. I applied a drop of the sugar paste on the ends of the cookies and stuck sliver sugar balls :)

You can even simply sprinkle some sugar powder to give it a snowy look :)

For Almond finger cookies:

Replace the vanilla essence with a tsp of almond essence and follow the same recipe as above.

Roll out a large 1/4 inch circle and sprinkle some ground almond powder on it and just press lightly to fix it with the dough.

Press 1/2 inch lines with a scale or knife to make groves and do the same on the other direction with the measurement of 2 inches to make finger sized cookies.

Bake, allow it to cool and then break them out to separate the cookies.

Tips:

Add cocoa to the same to make chocolate short bread cookies.

You can use instant coffee powder too for flavoring.

You can dip the cookies in melted chocolate.

You can also add few tsps of orange juice or lemon zest to make different flavors. :)

Written by: Nithya
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