So in Ireland,
around the holidays, it's really common to get a box of Walkers Scottish cookies.
I have really fond memories of them growing up.
They’re buttery, they're delicious and have a lovely tartan pack.
But I'm far away from home
so I wanted to recreate that iconic cookie for the holiday season.
So here they are,
the exact same cookie, but better because they're made from scratch.
They're absolutely delicious.
Here's the recipe.
First things first.
Let’s preheat our oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 degrees Celsius.
Then what we're going to do is take our eight by eight inch pan.
This is great
for shortbread and brownie making, so we probably all have one of these,
and then I'm going to show you my little nifty trick.
We're going to get a paper butter wrapper.
And this is what we do. Rather than throw it in the bin,
we are going to use this to grease our pan.
I do this with all of my baking and it's great
because you don't need to get a pastry brush, you don't need to dirty your hands
and you get to re-use something again before it goes in the bin.
So it's like the perfect solution.
And then we are going to line it
with a little bit of parchment paper
because we want to be able to get those cookies out of there.
Okay, so let's get stuck into our recipe.
Here I have my food processor.
It's really good to make this on a food processor
because it makes life so much easier and you don't have to touch it.
However, you can do it by hand if you don't have a food processor,
that's totally fine.
Let's start adding in our ingredients.
Here I have some all purpose flour. In it goes.
A little bit of granulated sugar.
Salt, super important to lift the flavor.
And then some rolled oats.
So funny enough, I've never made shortbread using oats before.
I never really knew it was a thing, but it's very traditional
in Scottish shortbread and it does add a lovely texture to it.
I just recommend that you use rolled oats, just definitely not steel cut oats
because those won't work.
So there we go. Everything in here.
Pop on your hat
and then we're just going to blend this up until everything gets really lovely
and fine, the sugar breaks down and also the oats.
So this has been blending for around 45 seconds to a minute or so,
and this is what we're looking for.
If you put your hands in there, you can feel that
the oats are nice and fine. They're still a bit lumpy.
That's totally fine.
They're not going to blend down completely, but it's just like this.
So that's ready to go.
Now let's talk about our butter, the most important ingredient
when it comes to shortbread, because it's half butter.
The reason that shortbread is called shortbread is because there's so much
fat in it and it makes it short, just like pastry and things like that.
Shortcrust pastry.
It means that there's loads of fat and that makes it
short, and short means crumbly and flaky and absolutely delicious.
So, butter. Butter has to be softened.
So leave this out overnight or you can pop it into the microwave very gently.
So my recommendation for butter is use really good quality and European
if you can because it has more fat and more flavor.
Pop your lid back on
and we are going to blend this up until it all forms one dough.
It just takes a few seconds. You can actually start to hear it
come together and this is what it looks like.
It will get in one big clump; just as it does that, stop the machine.
We don't need this to keep on blending and blending.
So this is lovely, nice, soft texture, but not too soft!
Because we are so prepared, I have my pan here
and we have our dough.
Then into our pan.
Once your dough is in your pan,
you can either use your hand or a spatula and just go in
nice and swiftly, just flatten it out as evenly as you can.
I've been doing this for years and I still don't get it
exactly even so it does take a bit of practice.
Okay so now for the scoring to give them that iconic Walkers shortbread look.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to take a knife and we are going to cut our pan into four.
And I want you to cut right down through the cookie.
You want to get nice and deep because they're going to bake
and that line is going to disappear a little bit.
So the deeper you get, the more that line will stay.
It will also make them much easier to cut later and they won't break up on you.
Now we're going to cut those squares in half.
Do do, do, do to do just like that.
And then cut those in half again.
So what you do is you end up with actually 16 cookies,
eight on top, eight on the bottom.
We're going to go in with our fork and we're going to give them those dots
because we love the shortbread with the dots.
We're just going to do a few little pricks and make that nice shape.
Lovely.
This is such a fast cookie to make and such a few ingredients.
It's perfect for when you're busy around the holidays.
Let's get these guys straight into the oven.
Bake your shortbread at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 180
degrees Celsius for roughly 35 to 40 minutes.
The secret with shortbread is we don't want to get it too brown.
Actually, just like golden brown is absolutely perfect.
The shortbread smells delicious.
But let me tell you what it's supposed to look like.
You see this lovely light golden brown like it's been kind of sun kissed?
This is what we're going for.
We don't want to get these a deep golden brown at all.
And then you see the indentations we made here?
They do disappear when they bake, that's all
we want to make sure we get them nice and deep
so we can still see our lines and we can still see the fork marks and everything.
So this is perfect.
I'm going to let these cool down in the tin for around 20 minutes,
half an hour or so, then we're going to cut them up.
Once the shortbread is cooled down, take a nice big knife
and cut into those indentations that we made earlier.
I recommend cutting up your shortbread while dough is still a little warm
because it will be easier to cut.
These look great but they are screaming to be put into a festive tin.
Wow, these look fantastic.
And you know what?
In my opinion, even better than the Walkers Scottish Shortbread.
The majority of this cookie is butter.
They are crumbly.
They're a little bit salty.
They are so delicious.
See this is what I remember from Christmases in Ireland
all those years ago.
Really buttery, has a lovely kind of iconic flavor
and also a little bit of a nicer texture with the oats in there.
How lovely would it be to get a big tin of these on the holidays,
open it up and see homemade shortbread just for you.
What a treat. So here's the great news.
I have tons more holiday cookie recipes just for you,
so stick around and check them out.