Scrumptious Shortbread Shortcut

This recipe will help you bake melt-in-your-mouth cookies for every occasion with only 7 ingredients and in less than half an hour before company arrives

I’m no baker. In fact, I usually make a huge mess in the kitchen and end up either burning my creations or undercooking them. I was determined to find something that even I could bake and asked my mother if she had any ideas. So out came her homemade recipe book, and we found simple shortbread instructions from my great-grandmother; it looked as though I could make them without causing too much damage.

The recipe consists of 7 components, and although I needed help to find rice flour, the rest was relatively simple:

• 1 lb butter
• 3 cups flour (sifted)
• 1 cup icing sugar
• 1/2 cup corn starch
• 1 tbsp rice flour
• 1 tsp vanilla
• sprinkles (or decoration of choice)

The first step is to cream the butter—something that I thought would be relatively easy. My advice is to make sure the butter is room temperature before starting otherwise. As I learned, it is quite difficult to do if it’s not. After battling with it for a while, I finally succeeded in making it look like this:

The next step is to add all the other ingredients and continue to beat until it looks like whipped cream.

So here I was making flour fly all over my kitchen, and the consistency was nowhere near where it was supposed to be. Instead of whipped cream, I had a wet powdery substance, but I decided to continue anyway; it had to be close enough by now.

Since I couldn’t get the ingredients to become the consistency of whipped cream, I decided to roll the dough into balls with my hands and gently place them on the cookie sheet, instead of dropping creamy spoonfuls as the recipe suggested. They were a bit crumbly but held together pretty well. Once the oven hit 350˚F, I popped them in for approximately 12 minutes. The bottoms were nice and brown, and the tops were slowly starting to turn a warm caramel colour.

The last step was to decorate! It actually turned out to be the hardest part because the sprinkles weren’t sticking to the cookies. After manually pushing them into every individual cookie, the finished product looked quite delicious—and tasted great too. I chose rainbow sprinkles, but decorations could definitely be modified to fit any theme. There are so many possibilities!

Despite my kitchen woes, these simple shortbread cookies took me less than half an hour to make—and without any major mishaps.