What Katy baked next...: February 2014

Another one inspired by the Barefoot Contessa.
She had teeny weeny playing card cookie cutters!! I needed them.
Amazon had them.
Now I have them.
Aces!!

So- here's Ina's recipe.
This isn't the page I originally used, but all her shortbread recipes are pretty much the same.
I can't find the page I actually used when making these, but what I *really* should have done was read the comments at the bottom...
That would have made things much easier. I make these mistakes so you don't have to!

"Ingredients

3/4 pound unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt (I used table salt. I just don't have that many salts in my kitchen)
Blackcurrant jam
Strawberry jam

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

In the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and 1 cup of sugar until they are just combined. Add the vanilla. In a medium bowl, sift together the flour and salt; then add them to the butter-and-sugar mixture. Mix on low speed until the dough starts to come together. Dump onto a surface dusted with flour and roll shape into a flat disk. Wrap in plastic and chill for 30 minutes."

Now... things had already started going wrong for me. I'd left the butter out at room temp for 3 days in the hope of softening it sufficiently. It was soft, yes... but not enough!

I also didn't use a mixer. The original recipe stated that was optional. I don't use mixers much. It just means more washing up. So I didn't bother.

The butter and sugar creamed together all fine and dandy.

It was adding the flour that was tough. There's a lot of flour. I got it to the "just combined" step. I even dumped it out, like she suggested. But it was a crumbly pile of crumbs. Terrible... I had to knead it until it was soft enough to form a ball. Not at all what the recipe had in mind.

And then after chilling it for the 30 minutes, I had to knead it again to get it to roll out at all.

Not entirely sure what had gone wrong, but it seemed that lots of commenters had the same issue.

Some suggested we hadn't used enough butter, perhaps only using 3/4 cup rather than 3/4lb., but that wasn't the case.

Turns out in the video that was only available to the Americas, Ina pours everything into the mixer at once, and beats it for longer.

Any way. That's something to try another day. 3/4lb of butter doesn't come cheap!

So, by massively over working the dough I'd created tough cookies, which is just tough.

Onwards!

What was her next step? Oh yes. The rolling and cutting out.
You don't need instructions for that.
Roll it out. Cut it out. Put it on a tray. Easy.
(oh, and if you put the tray in the fridge for 15 minutes before baking you limit the spread of the cookies, and keep the edges sharper)

oooh, pretty!

And here they are baked - 20-25 mins until lightly golden brown. Don't worry if they're still soft; they continue to firm on the baking tray.

After about 10 minutes resting on the trays, transfer the biscuits to cooling racks.

hmmm. I really need a window on my oven door!

Match up tops and bottoms - and separate into two.

Spread jam on the bottoms - red jam for the hears and diamonds, black jam for the clubs and spades.

Sprinkle the tops with a generous amount of icing sugar (look - there's my icing sugar sprinkler!)
Don't forget to do this part before assembling, otherwise you cover the jam in sugar as well.

Put the tops on top of the bottoms (holding the biscuits by the edges so as not to disturb the sugar)

Et voila!!

Big ones, little ones!

These were actually better the next day. The cookies had absorbed some of the jammy juices and had softened up nicely.

You can buy the shaped cookie cutters here and presumably some other places...