Easy 3 Ingredient Shortbread Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to making good shortbread cookies? ›

The most common mistakes when making shortbread are over-working the dough, and incorporating too much flour. The less you work the dough, the more crumbly and melt-in-your-mouth your shortbread cookies will be.

Put the flour, butter and sugar into a mixing bowl. Use your hands to combine the ingredients until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs, then squeeze until it comes together as a dough.

Compared to butter cookies, shortbread uses a higher ratio of butter to flour, and is baked at a lower temperature. This gives it its signature delicate consistency that crumbles in the mouth when bitten. It's also often baked in a pan and cut up after baking, rather than being cut into shapes before baking.

Place the dough in the fridge to chill for about 1 hour, or longer. Preheat your oven to 325°F / 163°C. Place the pan in the center of the oven, and bake the cookies for about 45 – 60 minutes, until the edges are golden brown. A 9 inch pan may only take 40 – 45 minutes, and an 8 inch pan may take up to 60 minutes.

Adding hard-boiled egg yolks to a basic shortbread recipe makes cookies more tender with the perfect buttery-soft texture. The addition is a sure-fire way to improve the texture of your cookies, but perhaps not always worth the extra time and effort.

Do I need to chill shortbread before baking? While some recipes call for the dough to be chilled before baking, you don't need to chill it in this recipe! The dough gets pressed into a baking pan, so we don't need to worry about it spreading on a baking sheet.

If it's too warm, the butter and sugar cannot properly cream and the cookies will taste dense. Many shortbread recipes call for cold butter worked into the dry ingredients and that gives you a wonderfully flaky cookie but if not mixed properly, the results can be inconsistent.

Traditional Scottish shortbread is a simple recipe made with sugar, butter, flour, and salt. Other shortbread styles will include leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda, which makes them crisp instead of crumbly like traditional Scottish shortbread.

Samoas are now “Caramel deLites.” Do-si-dos are “Peanut Butter Sandwiches.” Tagalongs are “Peanut Butter Cookies” and Trefoils are “Shortbreads.” But how are we going to move cookies with dull names like “Peanut Butter Patties?” And won't we get tired of explaining to customers what happened with the names?

What is traditional Scottish shortbread made from? ›

Shortbread is a centuries old traditional Scottish biscuit made from butter, sugar, and flour. In fact the first written recipe dates back to 1736. The 'short' in the name comes from the baking term 'short' which just means it has a high percentage of fat.

Unsalted butter for best results

Use unsalted butter for balanced flavour. Unsalted butter was traditionally used in baking because it was a superior product to salted - salt is used as a preservative so unsalted butter was thought to be fresher.

Butter – You'll need salted butter that's at room temperature. It can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour to bring the butter to room temperature, so make sure you give yourself enough time. If you don't have salted butter, unsalted butter will also work, simply add about ¼ teaspoon of salt to the cookie dough.

A cornstarch shortbread cookie is a shortbread cookie that contains cornstarch along with all-purpose flour in the cookie dough. The cornstarch is used to give these buttery treats a crispy, melt-in-the-mouth texture. It also helps prevent the cookies from becoming too crumbly and breaking apart.

Shortbread relies on really good-quality unsalted butter for its flavour, so don't skimp on this and never use margarine!

Butter is an emulsifier and it makes cookies tender. It also adds in the crispy-around-the-edges element. Adding too much butter can cause the cookies to be flat and greasy. Adding too little butter can cause the cookies to be tough and crumbly.

Shortbread should always have a tender, melting texture, but be slightly crisp when you bite into it. It should not generally be damp or wet underneath. A classic shortbread recipe will also only have flour, butter and sugar as the ingredients (in a 3:2:1 ratio) and not egg, which could lead to excess moisture.

Irish Shortbread Is Distinct From Scottish Shortbread

As cornstarch is a potent thickener relative to flour, this creates a denser cookie. Whichever version of shortbread you prefer, though, the original -- which is often just called "shortbread" -- came from Scotland.