Highland Shortbread

I’ve been working on biscotti over the past week or two with reasonably pleasing results and no doubt something will be appearing here once I’ve come up with a recipe I really like. In the meantime I thought I’d pop my recipe for highland shortbread on the blog as it was reading about biscotti a couple of years ago that helped me to crack cooking shortbread in the aga.

Shortbread is something I make a lot of – it is really, really easy and always very popular. If you go to see Rod Stewart you’d want him to sing Maggie May wouldn’t you..? Well most people want my shortbread as it’s probably my biggest hit!

As you will no doubt be aware, the aga is great for not drying things out when cooking but this can be a bit of a problem if you want crisp biscuits. I found when I first started to cook shortbread – and most other biscuits in the aga that whilst it browned them beautifully the crispness I was used to from the electric oven in my previous house eluded me. Then I read that the Italian word biscotti translates literally as “twice baked” and this inspired me to try something a little different.

By baking the biscuits firstly in the baking oven but for a slightly shorter time then transferring them to the simmering oven for a long slow drying period I achieved a wonderfully light crisp shortbread which has fans wherever it goes. I suspect it would keep well too but it never lasts long enough for me to find out!

Ingredients

8 oz Butter
3.5 oz Caster Sugar
8 oz Plain Flour
4 oz Ground Rice
Demerara Sugar
Method
Cream butter and caster sugar until fluffy
Add flour and ground rice – mix well
Split biscuit dough into two halves
Roll into sausage shape then roll in the demerara sugar
Divide each sauage of biscuit dough into 16 slices
Place shortbread rounds onto two baking trays

Aga: Baking oven shelf 1 for 12 minutes (9 minutes and turn through 180 for a further three) then simmering oven for 45 minutes to crisp

I have found it best to bake the trays one at time in the baking oven but the crisping I do by putting the first tray on the floor of the simmering oven then the second on a gridshelf half way up, the overall time for the tray on the floor being 1 hour, the tray half way up being 45 minutes.

Gas 5 / 375 F / 190 C for approx 15 minutes

Here is a link to a printer friendly recipe card for my shortbread

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Tags: aga, cooking, Shortbread