Hi, I'm Julia Busuttil Nishimura.
And today I'm going to be sharing with you
how I make my almond lemon shortbread.
They're really simple to put together.
They keep really well,
and they're perfect for Christmas gifting.
So I'm just gonna step you through how we do it.
So I've got plain flour here.
I've got caster sugar.
I've got some fine sea salt and baking powder.
And I've also got some ground almonds,
which I've ground myself.
So they're just natural almonds
that I've whizzed up in the food processor.
So not too finely ground,
still a little bit of texture,
which is gonna give the biscuits a nice crunch
once they're baked.
So they just go straight in as well.
And I've also got the zest of a lemon.
You could do orange, you can even do lime.
I'm just gonna give it a little stir
with the wooden spoon.
And then here I've got unsalted butter,
which is cold from the fridge.
I've cut it into cubes.
We're gonna put that straight in as well.
And then I'm going to use my hands, my fingertips, actually,
to kind of coat the butter first off
and then rub the butter into the flour.
This is a really fun recipe
for the kids to get involved with.
Alrighty, I think we're there.
Just gonna brush off my hands.
And the last thing that we need to add in is the eggs.
So one whole egg,
and then one egg yolk.
So I'll just separate that here.
Goes in.
It's our wet ingredient.
We want it to just incorporate to a nice biscuit dough.
We don't want to overwork the dough too much here.
We want the biscuits to be nice and short.
That's why they're called shortbreads.
So nice and kind of tender and crumbly.
So I might tip it out here
so you can see it a little bit easier.
I'm just gonna kind of work it together.
It is quite buttery so it melts quickly.
So we just want to be quite quick with it
so the butter doesn't melt too much.
And that's our biscuit dough,
our shortbread dough, ready to go.
So we're just going to flatten it out
and then I'll wrap it up
and pop it in the fridge for about an hour until it's firm.
And then we'll roll it out and cut it into circles.
I've just unwrapped it and dusted my board
with some extra flour.
I'm just going to dust the top as well
because it does have a lot of butter in it,
it does become quite sticky.
So you do want to have it nicely floured,
and we're just going to,
just gonna roll it out to about five mil
in thickness.
So I'm just going to keep rotating,
if you feel it starting to stick
just flour the bottom again.
And if it breaks a little bit that's all right,
it does kind of piece back together quite easily.
All right and then I've just got,
this is actually an espresso cup,
but if you've got a cookie cutter, that's perfect.
I'm just going to dip it into the flour
and kind of punch out these circles here,
which we just put onto the board.
All right, so I've got a tray lined with baking paper.
They do spread out a little bit
so I'm just going to give them enough room
to kind of spread.
And the way I do it is I go three and then two,
and then we can go three again.
So we're gonna cook these in batches.
And I've got my oven preheated to 180,
and these are only going to take
about 12 to 15 minutes to cook.
We want them to be a little bit brown, not too dark.
And then we just leave them to cool
and then we'll get back to it.
So the cookies have baked.
I've let them cool on the tray
and I've dusted them with some icing sugar
once they've cooled down.
I've just transferred them to a plate
and dusted them with a little bit more icing sugar
and they're ready to serve.
You can store them in a biscuit tin,
just with layers of icing sugar in between.
So these are my lemon almond shortbread biscuits.
I hope you enjoy making them.
Can't wait to see, take care.