Easy Shortbread Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to good shortbread? ›

The most common mistakes when making shortbread are over-working the dough, and incorporating too much flour.

Traditional Scottish shortbread is a simple recipe made with sugar, butter, flour, and salt. Other shortbread styles will include leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda, which makes them crisp instead of crumbly like traditional Scottish shortbread.

Compared to butter cookies, shortbread uses a higher ratio of butter to flour, and is baked at a lower temperature. This gives it its signature delicate consistency that crumbles in the mouth when bitten. It's also often baked in a pan and cut up after baking, rather than being cut into shapes before baking.

As Leiths also recommend chilling the dough before baking, although only for 15 minutes, I make another batch of their recipe with soft butter, stick it straight in the oven without passing the fridge, and end up with thinner, crunchier biscuits – presumably because the mixture spreads as the fat melts.

Takeaway: look for recipes that use granulated sugar for a more crisp-style shortbread and powdered sugar for a more tender shortbread!

Many shortbread recipes call for cold butter worked into the dry ingredients and that gives you a wonderfully flaky cookie but if not mixed properly, the results can be inconsistent. I usually stick with creamed room temperature butter.

It is super crumbly as a result of minimal kneading. As the dough isn't worked very much, gluten can't build up so the shortbread stays very fragile. The addition of semolina or rice flour helps increase the crumbliness whereas cornstarch makes the biscuits denser and therefore harder.

However, lipids, which are a component to food such as shortbread cookies are considered unhealthy because they are the most energetic nutrients in food and are a source of saturated fatty acids (SFA) (usually 40%) and sometimes also trans fatty isomers (TFA) [4,5,6].

The word "bread" comes from "biscuit bread" which was made from leftover bread dough that was sweetened and dried out in the oven to make biscuits. Why do you poke holes in shortbread? The holes allow the moisture to escape during baking and more even heat distribution. This helps dry out and crisp up the cookies.

What is the new name for shortbread? ›

Shortbread is now Trefoils®! they're ABC cookies? always called them trefoils!

Shortbread or shortie is a traditional Scottish biscuit usually made from one part white sugar, two parts butter, and three to four parts plain wheat flour. Shortbread does not contain any leavening, such as baking powder or baking soda.

Making shortbread cookies with cornstarch is necessary for a tender and delicate cookie. Next time you make chocolate chip cookies, I suggest you try adding 1 Tbsp of cornstarch to the batch to help keep them extra soft and tender.

Unsalted butter is most commonly called for in baking recipes. Unsalted butter has a very neutral, creamy flavor—a great base for many baked goods. In baking, precise measurements are key for achieving the right flavor and texture. This even extends to small amounts of ingredients like salt.

To make a copycat version of Chessmen cookies at home, the recipe is a simple butter cookie cut out in a special shape. A butter cookie is slightly different from shortbread but with a higher ratio of sugar to butter. This allows a butter cookie to hold its shape rather than having a tendency to crumble.

It's all in the quality of the ingredients. With such a short ingredient list, the quality makes a big difference. The perfect shortbread cookie should be crumbly, but not dry, buttery but not greasy and sweet but not sickly.

Unsalted Butter: As the base of nearly all shortbread recipes, butter supplies these classic cookies with flavor and softness. Make sure you use room temperature butter that's still cool to the touch. If it's too warm, the butter and sugar cannot properly cream and the cookies will taste dense.

Start with a teaspoon of fat and mix your dough well. If the dough is still falling apart, you can keep adding more in small increments. And at the end of the day, you can always add a little bit of water as well if your shortbread still hasn't formed a cohesive dough.