Tag: shortbread

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

79. Dark Chocolate Shortbread p.688

The recipe

I made this recipe before I’d formally started The Project. I didn’t have my own camera back then so I invited friends over to both eat, and photograph, my food. I recently received a batch of those photos, and now I’m trying to remember how something tasted a year and a half later. Frankly I’m quite surprised at how well I do remember some of them. There’s a Roast Pork With Sweet-and-Sour Chile Cilantro Sauce that has faded from memory enough that I don’t feel confident writing about it, so I’ll submit it to the redo pile. But, on the whole I feel pretty confident in my memories. For next few recipes you might have to excuse some hazy spots in my recollection. I’ll try to fill in the missing bits with lies and wild imaginings.

The Book is a fan of shortbread, it gets integrated into all sorts of squares, cookies, bars, confections and who knows what else. Both of the ones I’ve tried have turned out beautifully. Shortbread is about as simple as a baked good can get, and provided that the very short list of ingredients that go in are top quality the results are inevitably delicious. It does burn rather easily, so careful monitoring is a good habit to get into. In this recipe the shortbread is cut into wedge shaped cookies, and eaten on it’s own. The recipe recommends pairing these with a glass of port after dinner.

The twist in this recipe is the addition of 1/4 cup of dutch-process cocoa powder to the basic recipe. The cocoa was successful in turning the shortbread a dark chocolaty colour, and between the name and appearance of these cookies you’d expect them to taste chocolaty. In fact they taste like shortbread, with a hint of bitterness. I was surprised at how un-chocolaty these ended up, food colouring would have produced the same result. Now, shortbread is delicious, but when you bite into something billed as Dark Chocolate Shortbread, you might expect it to taste like chocolate. I was a bit let down by that trickery.

I might make these again if I was serving a shortbread tray a Christmas and wanted to alternate light and dark pieces for visual effect, but as it was it just built up and dashed a hope of chocolately shortbread goodness. I might try cutting the white flour down to 1/2 cup, and bumping the cocoa up to 1/2 cup, maybe then we’d have a chocolate shortbread recipe worth talking about. These were by no means bad, but they were by no means chocolate either.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

49. Lemon Bars p.691

No recipe for this one. But they were so good I can’t help but giving you the recipe and them a five mushroom rating.

FOR CRUST
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

FOR FILLING
3 large eggs
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt

Confectioners’ sugar for sprinkling

MAKE THE CRUST: Put a rack in middle of oven and preheat oven to 350F.
Pulse together four, sugar, and salt in a food processor just until combined. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Press dough onto bottom of an ungreased 9-inch square baking pan. Bake until golden brown, about 20 minutes.

MEANWHILE, MAKE THE FILLING: Whisk together eggs, granulated sugar, flour, heavy cream, zest, juice, and salt in a bowl until combined.

BAKE THE BARS: When crust is baked, rewhisk lemon mixture and pour onto hot crust. Bake until just set, about 16 minutes. Transfer pan to a rack to cool.

Refrigerate bars, covered, until cold, at least 4 hours. Before serving, cut into bars and sprinkle with a thick layer of confectioners’ sugar.

I’m sure we’ve all eaten a million lemon bars, some insipid, some inspired. We all know the bad ones with their mushy oily crusts, and super sweet lemon topping that’s either sloppy pudding, or a Fruit Roll-Up. Worse is the health-food version with a cardboard dry crust that crumbles if you look at it, and artificial sweeteners. My ideal lemon bar is built on really good shortbread, where good quality fresh butter is a must. The topping should be a sweet-tart just set lemon custard that’s thick enough to stay in place but avoid gumminess at all costs.

This bar lived up to that ideal quite nicely. All of the shortbread recipes in The Book seem to come out beautifully, and this one was no exception. The lemon topping balanced the tart acid of the lemons with just enough sugar, and added zip to the smooth egg and cream custard. Add a bit of powdered sugar and it was good to to.

In making this recipe I learned the value of measuring your baking dish. It calls for a 9 inch square, and I grabbed something significantly larger without thinking it though. I spread the shortbread out on one half of the pan and baked it. When it came time to pour the liquid custard on top of it I realized I had a problem. I attempted to rig up a shield wall out of aluminum foil to keep the filling on the shortbread, but my wall breached during baking. I ended up with a deep pool of filling on one side of the sheet pan, and much less filling on the shortbread than I would have liked. It was still totally delicious with half the filling, and I can only imagine that it would have been better had I not messed up.

Lemon bars, you’re the second recipe in a row to earn your five mushroom rating. Kudos.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

35. Cranberry Caramel Bars p.691


the recipe

I really enjoyed these bars. I brought half of them to a party, and they disappeared instantly. I enjoyed more of them over the next week, and brought out even more from the freezer a couple months later. All that to say, the recipe make a lot of bars, and they keep and freeze well. They’re filled with pecans coated in a buttery-tart cranberry caramel. This filling goes down onto a shortbread base, and the whole thing is drizzled with melted chocolate. They weren’t light, they weren’t particularly easy to put together, they weren’t cheap, but they were absolutely worth it.

Any bar that starts with a shortbread base is off to a good start in my book. It’s so simple, and invariably fantastic. The cranberry caramel tasted great. The butter and sugar were cut by the tart cranberries, which kept it from tasting too rich. The caramel allowed me to play with my candy thermometer, and convinced me I really need a better one. Because the butter goes into the caramel from the beginning it’s got to be monitored carefully. It needs to get hot enough for the sugar to caramelize, but not so hot that the milk-solids in the butter burn. Once the cranberries and pecans have been added and the mixture has been allowed to return to 245 degrees it has to be spread out on the shortbread base very quickly. The caramel is dense, sticky, stringy, and ferociously hot. An errant bit of pecan slipped off my silicone spatula and landed on my wrist. The candy Gods reminded me not to be too casual with a nice little burn.

After the bars have cooled you can add the chocolate. The book recommends snipping the end off a Ziplock bag, but there’s no reason you can’t use a pastry bag if you have one. I wish I’d been a bit more careful in decorating them, my random crosshatch wasn’t the most attractive, nothing wrong with it, but I could have made them prettier. The chocolate was nice, but certainly not necessary. They might have been better looking without it, and while the flavour didn’t detract at all I’m not sure it added much. Between cranberries, pecans, and shortbread there was a lot going on flavour-wise, and chocolate didn’t particularly elevate, or marry these flavours. I know the “add chocolate to make it better” school is strong, but in this case adding chocolate made them chocolatier, not necessarily better.

These squares would be a welcome addition to any Christmas baking repertoire, and work well for pretty much any occasion the rest of the year too. Because they keep so well, they’re ideal do-aheads. I thought the flavour and texture were great, really crunchy between the shortbread and nuts, with a gooey chewiness from the caramel. The caramel also acted as a glue, and counteracted some of the crumbling problems that shortbread is prone to. With or without chocolate these are delicious, reliable, and impressive squares. They probably merit a 5 mushroom rating, but they lost half a mushroom for attacking me.