Shortbread is a relatively easy biscuit to make. I mean, it only has three ingredients: sugar, butter, and flour. Yet somehow, I manage to mess up this very simple recipe. Mine often turns out crumbly, rarely in one piece, dry, and sometimes unevenly cooked. And I don’t mean slightly dry — I mean drier-than-a-dessert dry.
So, I decided to fix that.
Over the course of January, I’ve been baking shortbread to see whether I can finally perfect my recipe, or whether I’m simply destined to produce desert-dry shortbread that requires a glass of water with every bite. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration — but you get the picture.
The first step in my mission to fix my shortbread was research. No surprises there.
I wanted to understand what makes shortbread dry and what makes it crumbly. After all, if I can identify what I’m doing wrong, surely I can fix it. A quick Google search revealed several possible culprits: too much flour or not enough fat, improper flour measurement, over-mixing, or using cold butter instead of softened butter. There’s a lot of room for user error there — and I can definitely see myself in some of those mistakes.
While it could simply be that I’m not very good at baking, I’m determined to fix this recipe and proudly add it to my new recipe book as a success. And to make it a success, I decided experiments were necessary.
For my experiment, I planned to find a new recipe and bake it twice during January. After the first bake, I would assess what (if anything) went wrong and attempt to fix it for the second bake — or see whether I could recreate it successfully the second time around. Of course, to get the best results, I needed guinea pigs to taste my baking and provide honest feedback.
Enter my family.
They don’t know they’re my guinea pigs (unless they read this post, lol), but I trust them to give me honest opinions.
Now that I have everything I need, let’s get experimenting.
My initial thoughts were very positive. The recipe requires you to put all three ingredients into the bowl at the same time — no creaming the butter and sugar beforehand. This instantly made things simpler because, if you look at the next step, you’re instructed to get your hands stuck in there. Literally.
While this was a messy process, it was also easy and straightforward, which was perfect for this baker. Although the recipe suggests cutting the shortbread into rectangles, I decided to use a cookie cutter instead to keep them roughly the same size and make round biscuits. However, just because they were the same size didn’t mean they were uniform in thickness. I ended up with a mix of thicker and thinner biscuits.
Another thing I noticed was that the recipe instructed you to chill the cut biscuits in the fridge before baking. I’ve recently started doing something similar with my gingerbread dough, although I usually chill it before rolling it out. Anyway, back to the shortbread — the first batch came out great. The thinner biscuits were crunchier (my personal favourite), while the slightly thicker ones were softer in texture.
You might now be wondering how this compared to my previous failures. The dough wasn’t crumbly, the biscuits weren’t dry, and nothing was undercooked. My dad tried a couple and even said he preferred the thicker biscuits, so it seems the only real issue was the inconsistency in thickness.
With the first test batch officially a success, it was time for the second batch to see if I could recreate the magic.
Test batch two went just as smoothly — if not easier — than the first, mainly because once everything was measured out, I was good to go. When the biscuits were baked and ready, I realised I needed a slightly different set of guinea pigs this time (I couldn’t make my dad eat all the biscuits). So, I took them into the office and let a few colleagues and friends try them.
The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone enjoyed the biscuits, although opinions varied on whether the thicker or thinner ones were better.
I should mention that for both bakes, I used a vegan butter (my personal preference), and I don’t think this affected the recipe at all. It did, however, mean that my vegan colleague could join in on the tasting, which was a bonus.
Overall, I’d say this recipe completely fixed the shortbread issues I mentioned at the start of this post. I no longer produce shortbread that’s drier than the desert. Instead, I make lovely shortbread biscuits that can be either crunchy or soft, depending on the thickness. The only thing I still need to work on is rolling the dough to a consistent thickness — but a quick search on Amazon led me to a rolling pin that should fix that problem.
This recipe is definitely making it into the new recipe book. (Photos coming soon to Instagram!)
Now the question is: where do I go next in this baking series? Do I tackle another recipe? Attempt to fix my icing-disaster cupcakes or cookies? Or try my hand at overflowing muffins or muffins with a gooey centre?
A clue to my next baking challenge will appear on my Instagram in the coming weeks — let’s see if you can guess what’s next. 🍰
From my cozy corner to yours,
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