The Long and Short Of It

I was talking to our aunt the other day and inevitably the topic of readiness for Christmas came up. Over the course of our conversation, she told me a story about how our father, as a teenager, used to steal shortbread off the baking sheet that our grandmother had just taken out of the oven. This immediately triggered a very clear memory for me of the cracker box full of shortbread that our grandmother sent to our family every year at Christmas. And when Big Sis described in great detail her memory of taking small bites of the shortbread to make it last longer because it tasted so good, it took me right back to those childhood memories of excitement when that cracker box of cookies arrived.

To Bake Or Not To Bake?

This got me to thinking, perhaps I should make some shortbread this year and why not use our grandmother’s recipe to make it. Those of you who know me understand that I am a mediocre baker at best, so this would be somewhat of a leap for me. And my track record where shortbread is concerned is not a good one despite trying numerous different recipes. To increase my chances of success I thought using my grandmother’s recipe might help and felt like it would be a nod to our grandmother and the happy Christmas memory she gave us. So after paying a king’s ransom for butter I was ready, all I needed was grandma’s recipe.

Wherefore Art Thou Recipe

Big Sis is an inspired Christmas baker and keeper of a lot of our grandmother’s memorabilia, so I knew she would have the shortbread recipe and she did, sort of… It seems that grandma didn’t have her shortbread recipe written down. She just relied on her memory of making it year after year. Our mother did at some point write down the recipe which made its way to Big Sis after mom passed away. But as often happens, the recipe written down by mom is nowhere to be found, despite Big Sis hunting through reams of papers, photos and other mementos. However, there is a silver lining of sorts – a few years ago Big Sis put together a book of family recipes for her daughters which included grandma’s shortbread recipe. And as you can see Big Sis has, over the years, added her comments to the original recipe, a big bonus for me as a failed shortbread maker. Perhaps this could work out.

Rolling Along

Determined to have this be the year of shortbread success, I followed the recipe to the nth degree, even googling how to know when butter is properly creamed and when dough is officially considered chilled. Armed with all this information, I followed the recipe to a “t” and ended up with what I thought was suitable dough. So far so good. I was careful, as Big Sis wrote, not to roll the dough too thin and chilled the dough before baking. Watching each batch of cookies in the oven like a hawk to ensure the bottom of the cookies were “slightly brown,” the end result was three dozen shortbread cookies that I was proud of. And if I do say so myself, taste just like shortbread should – buttery and sweet. The challenge now is to make sure they don’t all get eaten before Christmas.