More often than not, you’ll see recipe blogs that have a lengthy novel preceding the actual recipe itself and you have to slog through three thousand words just to find out the temperature at which you should preheat your oven. Your fingers are tired from scrolling and you just want to get on with it already but, first, you have to hear all about the blogger’s most recent trip they took to Lake Erie in the spring. Complete with vivid photography and lengthy exposition.
Well, dear Reader, I regret to inform you that, if you were hoping to avoid that type of experience here, you will be sorely disappointed. I do, however, promise that this novel shall be of the (mostly) educational sort. However, if you think you know all there is to know about shortbread and don’t require photos for reference, you may skip straight to the recipe here.
Because I am a benevolent food god. I hope you’ll remember this.
This story actually dates back roughly seven years or so when I was required to attend a staff retreat at work. (Yay, mandatory fun that was actually not fun at all.) The owners of location we used that year were nice enough to leave behind treats for us to snack on during the day. And those treats came in the form of some of the best, sweet, buttery, salty Scottish shortbread I’d ever had. My coworkers all seemed to agree as the shortbread disappeared in short order. (See what I did there?)
After that retreat, I made it my life’s work to try replicating that shortbread. (Okay, it was more like my life’s work during the holidays because that’s when I had the time.)
So, after many years, many recipes, many failures, and a few triumphs, I finally cracked the code. Once I did that, I decided it was time to give them a bit of personalization. Thus, the addition of lavender. It’s one of my favorite flavors and I have to admit that I somewhat enjoy the masochistic challenge of making sure whatever I put it in doesn’t end up tasting like soap.
Everything was grand! The shortbread was good, the people who ate said shortbread also declared it as good. I was riding on a high of good. Then, people started asking me for the recipe and I panicked. I’d made so many batches of shortbread over the years, but I never wrote anything down. Not even once. It all lived in my head.
That’s how recipes have always been shared in my family; passed down through generations like oral traditions. You would spend some time with your relative in their kitchen and they’d make you go through the grueling grunt work of ingredient preparation before they bestowed their culinary knowledge upon you. You learned by doing. You never needed measurements because you knew, by the look/feel of it, if you got it right.
So, my dear Reader, this is where the incongruity originated. But, I hoped to bridge the gap this year by taking sloppy notes on the back of a dirty paper placemat with an old pen that will probably curse me for the rest of its natural life for getting butter and flour in its seams. I have attempted to give you both the visual and the notational (is that even a word?) experience.
Let’s get started. You’ll want to preheat your oven to 325° at this point.
The first part is pretty standard as far as baking any sort of sweets goes. You need to cream 1 cup of butter with half a cup of sugars. Yes, I spelled that right; sugars. The sugars consist of one-quarter cup of packed brown sugar and one quarter cup of my ridiculous signature ingredient.
Yes, I can hear you laughing from here. No matter, this is very serious business. Mostly.
It’s basically infused sugar that’s kept in a jar with pounded lavender for a couple of weeks. I shake it around to distribute the lavender through it every few days (or whenever I remember, really) and then I sift the lavender buds out before adding it to the butter with the brown sugar. This usually allows me to add a little less lavender to the dough later on. Now, you absolutely can use just regular granulated sugar for this (and that is the version I’ve put in the recipe), but I am sticking to my story of using lavender sugar. Could it all just be some weird placebo effect? Possibly. I’m not a food scientist.
MOVING ON!
Once you’ve creamed your butter and sugars, you will add two-and-a-quarter (2 ¼) cups of flour to the bowl. What’s that, you say? You peeked at the recipe already and it says two-and-a-half cups? No, no, you’ve read it correctly. A quarter cup of the flour is set aside for later. This, too, is important but, if you happen to throw it all in there at once, don’t fret too much. It’ll just make the later stage of this a bit more challenging.
Now, add in the kosher salt. That’s right, kosher salt. We don’t want nigh microscopic granules of salt getting mixed in and lost with the sugar and butter and flour. We want bites of salt interspersed with the sweet dough to give us that tasty contrast that’ll kick you right in the tastebuds.
Lastly, we put in the lavender. But, you must first rough it up a bit.
Yeah, now we’re talking! Lavender can be a very reticent ingredient. Sometimes you have to… persuade it to release its flavor. Make it an offer it can’t refuse and all that.
Okay, now that you’ve added the flour, salt, and lavender to the creamed butter and sugars, give it a good mix. No, keep mixing. Yes, I know your arm is getting tired. Why doesn’t it look like dough yet? Because it’s supposed to look like this.
Just think of what it would look like if you added all of the flour at once? It would mostly resemble biscuit/scone dough and be very fine. But, as I said before, do not fret! Because now you get to use those two furnaces you have on the ends of your arms to heat up the butter and really turn it into a dough. That’s right, it’s kneading time, baby!
You know that quarter cup of flour you set aside? Now is its time to shine! use it to flour your kneading surface and get to work!
My preferred method is to pat it all together until it forms a mostly cohesive mass, then use a dough scraper to fold it over on itself until you can get a good knead on it. Don’t be afraid to use up that reserved flour as you go along! You’ll want to do so in order to keep the dough from getting too sticky. And, once you’ve gotten most of your stray crumbs to join the masses, you should have something like this.
Now we need to roll it out. First, make sure it’s on a piece of floured parchment paper. This makes it easier to peel the finished bars free once you’ve cut them. You know that waxy paper backing they put on sheets of stickers? Yeah, same concept. So, slap that bad boy on some lightly floured parchment and get rolling. You get to decided how thick or thin you like your shortbread at this point. Sometimes I like a nice thick bar around 1cm but, other times (i.e. when I accidentally roll it too flat and don’t feel like starting over), they’ll be around 0.5cm. (Silver lining: I get more bars this way.)
We have reached another crucial decision for you to make. (This is sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure, yeah?) (Except, it’s more like Choose How Much Effort You Want to Put Into This.) You must now determine what shape you want your shortbread to take. I tend to prefer the bar shape as it creates the least amount of waste since I also just bake the rounded bits on the ends as-is. (Mine are roughly 1 inch wide by 2 inches tall.) (Yes, I use a ruler, for I am not naturally skilled at free-hand bar cutting.) However, you can also whip out the cookie cutter and go to town. This time, I decided to be a little more meticulous about keeping the bars uniform (you can thank Great British Bake-Off for that influence) by rolling out the scraps again to cut a few more bars and pressing the remaining scraps into a rounded shape and cutting into quarters.
Don’t forget to prick the top of your bars! I use a skewer and put three divots into each one, mostly because my hand isn’t steady enough to wield a fork and get those cute little diagonal grids. However, if you are better with a fork, have at it!
At last, you’re ready to move the bars to your cookie sheet. Since these babies are buttery, you don’t need to grease a thing. BUT, you should still line your sheet with a silicone mat or parchment paper. Once you have them all moved over, you get to tell that dough to chill. Literally.
Pop that cookie sheet in the freezer for about five minutes prior to baking. Most of you who have made sugar cookies—or, really, any cookie that uses a significant amount of butter—will know the reason for doing this. Buttery cookies are notorious for spreading out in the oven if the dough isn’t chilled a bit before baking. The same rule applies here. Feel free to leave them in for an additional minute if your kitchen was particularly hot that day.
You’ll know they’re nicely chilled when you push one with your finger and it can scoot easily along the surface of the parchment/mat, but it’ll still be a little soft.
Place the cookie sheet on the top rack of your preheated oven and set a timer for twenty minutes. If they still look a bit pale after the time has elapsed, let them bake for an additional five minutes or until the corners start to look golden brown. Once you’re satisfied with their coloring, remove the tray from the oven and let them sit for a minute or two before using a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack.
Let them cool or, at least, wait until they’re cool enough to not burn the roof of your mouth when you eat them. And, voila, you’re done! See? That wasn’t so bad!
I can see some of you raising your hands like good little students to ask “Your dough looks like it has way more lavender than mine. What’s with that?” Ah, sweet Readers, what you see in the photos is the product of my own folly. I learned that day that lavender and fennel seed look awfully similar when their nearly identical sachets sit side-by-side in a darkened cupboard. Particularly when you’re in a hurry and distracted by trying to take photos of each step while mixing ingredients. (Mise en place. I cannot stress it enough.) So, I ended up with lavender fennel short bread by accident.
Again, I say, patience is a virtue. Do not be like me. I was never cut out to be a role model.
OH LOOK, here’s the recipe and not at all a cleverly-timed diversion from my flavoring fiasco. You’ve made it through the entire novel and found the light at the end of the tunnel. Well done, you!
Lavender Scottish Shortbread
Makes roughly 2 dozen 1cm thick bars.
Ingredients
- 1 cup salted butter, softened
- ¼ cup packed brown sugar
- ¼ cup granulated sugar
- 2 ½ cup all purpose flour (¼ cup set aside)
- 1 ½ tsp kosher salt
- 4 tsp pulverized lavender
Directions
- Preheat oven to 325° F.
- Cream butter and sugars together until smooth.
- Add flour, salt and lavender and mix until dough forms large crumbs.
- Pour the dough out onto floured surface and knead until it comes together into a smooth ball.
- Place the dough ball onto a floured sheet of parchment/wax paper and roll into a sheet around 0.5cm to 1cm thick.
- Cut the dough into bars or rounds as desired. Be sure to prick the tops of each piece a few times with a fork or skewer.
- Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silicone baking mat.
- Put the baking sheet in the freezer for 5 minutes.
- Bake shortbread for 20 – 25 minutes or until edges begin to brown.
The Intrepid Spoon 
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