A Little Family History

Some recipes are pure nostalgia, this is one of them.

I feel I should apologise for the long silence since my last post, studying for my bachelors degree in history is taking up a lot of my time right now. As is dealing with the worry of my eyesight slowly continuing to deteriorate - this time it’s a cataract, thankfully it’s treatable, I’m just going to have to wait for them to decide it’s worth treating. It would seem the opthamologists want to wait until my vision is being affected before they remove the cataract, however I’m not happy with this as my vision is already severely restricted so any further restrictions could seriously affect my ability to study, bake, and otherwise live my life whilst I wait for them to decide to operate.

That’s a fight for another day though, so for now, let’s talk of better things.

Everyone has something that immediately takes them back to their childhood, for me that has to be a shortbread recipe that has been in my family since at least my great-grandmother’s life. It’s a simple recipe that screams home, and comfort. My earliest memory is of watching my grandmother baking it in her tiny council house kitchen during one of the many weekends my siblings and I spent at her house. I recall that she had a little notebook with dog-eared pages that were yellow with age, I think I must have been 9 or 10 when I asked her about it and was told it contained her mother’s favourite recipes. I never knew my great-grandmother, from what I’ve been told, she passed away from cancer in her 50s, it gives me some joy to know that part of her survives in the recipes she handed down to her daughter, and from there through to me.

I’d give you a brief history of shortbread, but I think most people already know the gist of it. Like most of Britain’s best recipes, it comes to us by way of a conquered nation - in this case, that’s Scotland. How fitting then, that I decide to grace you with this recipe in the wake of Burns Night.

This recipe will give you 16 portions at 20.6g of carbohydrates per portion, so that’s 329.6g of carbohydrates for the whole batch. Please enjoy responsibly, and dose your insulin accordingly if, like me, you have to live with the challenges of Diabetes.

Your Equipment:

Electronic kitchen scales

Large bowl or food processor

Small baking tray (28 x 18 cm or roughly 6 x 10 inches)

Sharp knife

Fork

You Ingredients:

350 g all purpose flour

50 g cornflour (this gives the finished shortbread more shortness, you could use rice flour as an alternative)

1/2 tsp salt

100g fine sugar (not confectioner’s sugar, if you can’t get hold of fine sugar you could pulse regular sugar in a food processor for about 5 minutes)

250 g unsalted butter (or use salted but leave out the 1/2 tsp of salt) + extra to grease your baking tray

1 tbsp sugar for dusting

The All Important Method:

Grease your baking tray with a little butter, and preheat your over to 180 C (160 C for a fan oven) / 350 F (320 F for a fan oven).

Mix together all your dry ingredients, except for the tbsp of sugar, in your bowl or food processor. Cut the butter into 1/2 inch cubes and add this into your dry ingredients.

If you’re using a food processor simply blend until the ingredients resemble fine breadcrumbs, then pulse until they stick together to form a stiff dough. If you don’t have a food processor you’ll need to rub the butter into the dry ingredients using your fingertips until the mixture has the texture of breadcrumbs, now gather the mixture together and knead it into a stiff dough.

Press your dough into your baking tray, ensuring it’s pressed into the corners. If you want to use a rolling pin or something like a straight edged glass or a can in order to flatten the dough then that’s fine, most of the time I just use my hands.

Use a sharp knife to score the shortbread into 16 equal portions, you do this by cutting no more than half way through the dough. Now take your fork and use the prongs to give the shortbread its traditional dimples. Now sprinkle the remaining sugar over the surface.

Bake for 30 - 35 minutes.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin.

Fully separate the portions along the lines you marked earlier using a sharp knife.

Enjoy with a hot drink of your choosing, just be prepared for any pets in your house to be looking at you like this the whole time…

Loki (left) and Valkyrie (right) can’t resist a bit of freshly made shortbread. Just look at those little begging faces.