I am not a cookie person. I don’t like to eat them and I don’t like to make them.
But even I have a soft spot for Sammy’s shortbread. Oh so buttery, a little lemony,
and barely sweet.
Sammy is my 12 year old daughter who’s been messing around with shortbread on and off
for about a year until one day she made a truly spectacular cookie. The kind of cookie
that even her picky mom loved. I was so impressed, I asked her to see the recipe and she is like
“Oh, I was just messing around. I didn’t measure anything. I just mushed things together
in a bowl and kept tasting it until it seemed good and then I baked it. But don’t worry
Mom. I will make you a recipe.” So as soon as our schools closed for quarantine, Sammy
got serious. She got out the scale, she got out a notebook, and started testing cookies.
By the second week, she didn’t just produce perfect cookies on occasion, but had completely
reliable and reproducible results, and a recipe written up.
I asked if Sammy would be willing to teach my viewers how to make the cookies. She said
that she didn’t want to be in the video, but she’d be happy to teach me and then
I can teach you. Yesterday, I got my private cookie lesson, so I am ready.
A few little notes about ingredients.
We’ll need very soft unsalted butter for this recipe. The easiest way to do that is
to leave it out at room temperature overnight. If you forgot to do that, cut the butter up
into 1 Tbsp chunks, spread it out on a plate and microwave in 5-second bursts until it’s
soft. A little melting is fine, but try to keep it in the solid form.
Sammy tested these cookies both with King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour and with
Gold medal bleached flour. Both worked, but we prefered gold medal bleached because it
produced slightly more tender cookies. But it’s very flexible, so use what you’ve
got.
In a medium bowl, combine 174g of all-purpose flour (if possible bleached), 60 grams of
granulated sugar, and ½ tsp of Diamond Crystal Kosher salt or ¼ tsp of table salt.
Zest 1 lemon, though an orange or lime would also work well. Add the zest to the bowl and
mix all the dry ingredients to combine. Add 155 grams of very soft unsalted butter. Let
me show you how soft the butter should be. See it should take no effort at all to poke
through it with a finger. Grab a spoon or a stiff spatula and mush it all together.
You can certainly do this with a mixer using a paddle attachment, but Sammy likes doing
it with a spoon. This way she can count it as physical activity. I mean it’s practically
push ups. Keep pressing and squooshing. Don’t worry about overmixing or keeping little pieces
of butter in the dough. This is not pie dough.
Once the dough is almost homogeneous, give it a few folds by hand to bring it all together
into one lump.
Then form it into a chubby cylinder.
Cut it in half and form each half into a ball.
Then place each ball on a large piece of plastic wrap and roll it into a log that is about
10 inches long.
Wrap the log in plastic wrap and roll it around a bit to make it nice and even. Twist the
ends to secure them and flatten out the ends of the dough so that they don’t poke out.
Freeze your logs for 20 minutes or just until they firms up.
While the cookie dough is in the freezer, preheat the oven to 350F with the rack in
the middle.
Before we chilled the second log, we decided to use it for a little experiment. Can you
guess what we added? Squid ink! Just kidding. It’s Japanese black sesame paste. It’s
like tahini, but black. We love this nutty paste in any dessert. Ice-cream, pastry cream,
so why not cookies. We weren’t sure how much to add, so we kept adding some until
we could taste the nuttiness of sesame seeds without messing up the dough consistency.
It turned out to be 10 grams for 1 log, so if you are doing a full batch, it would be
20 grams. Then we rewrapped the dough, but I thought it might be fun to shape these into
little squares, so I squooshed it into a long rectangular prism sort of shape.
Our first log has been chilling for 20 minutes and it’s ready to bake. Slice it with a
sharp knife into ⅓ inch thick circles. Keep in mind that the cookies will spread out in
the oven, so they’ll end up thinner and wider than what you see now. You should end
up with about 24 of them. Arrange them on a parchment lined half sheet spacing them
out evenly. I ended up with a 4 by 6 grid of cookies. Bake them in the middle of 350F
oven for 10-15 minutes or until the edges start to brown.
These look good. Let’s get them out.
When you first pull the cookies out, it’s normal for them to still be a little soft
in the middle. They’ll firm up as they cool. Everyone in our family prefers them when the
bottom gets roughly the color of cinnamon. They are way more flavorful that way. We are
not sure what the Great British Baking Show judges would say about such brown shortbread,
but we don’t really care.
Once the first log is baked, you can slice and bake the second log. Don’t put 2 cookie
sheets in the oven at the same time or the cookies won’t bake evenly.
Cool them for 30 minutes and enjoy! Or store in an airtight container. They last really
well in theory. But we haven’t had the will pour to let them last more than 3 days.
Here I’ll break one for you so that you can see the texture. It’s so delicate, the
slightest pressure makes it snap.
And here are the black sesame ones with Sammy’s designs. I thought they were amazing.
Don’t be put off by the color. I know in the US gray desserts look weird to us. But
that’s just a cultural prejudice. After visiting Japan, any gray dessert makes me
salivate because I know it has black sesame seeds, just like any mud looking dessert makes
you salivate because you know it has chocolate.
You can find black sesame paste in HMart or any Asian store that carries a good variety
of Japanese ingredients or buy it on Amazon, linked below. You can also substitute tahini
for black sesame paste. Just don’t forget to stir both extremely well before using since
the oil separates from them; and keep them in the fridge so that they don’t go rancid.
I hope you give these cookies a try. It’s a great baking project to do with your kids.
There is really nothing tricky about them. Just please weigh your ingredients so that
you get the right texture. I hear this from parents all the time that they converted a
recipe from weight to cups so that they can bake with their kids. For some reason these
parents think that grams will confuse their 4 year old. You know what’s confusing -- 1
cup of sifted flour vs 1 cup of flour, , sifted. That’s completely different amounts.
I have a hard time explaining this to American grown up, let alone kids. 1 cup of sifted
flour should be roughly 113 gram because the flour is sifted into the cup, then leveled.
1 cup of flour, , sifted should be 142 grams because the flour is first scooped,
then leveled, and then sifted. I rest my case. In case you are wondering how using cups can
change your cookies, I’ll tell you. Most people pack way more flour into a cup than
they should, which makes the cookies taste like cardboard instead of buttery and crumbly.
Here are more very detailed culinary tutorials for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.