All-Butter Shortbread Fingers

Ingredients

Equipment Needed

• •20cm square baking tin
• •Baking parchment
• •Wooden spoon
• •Sharp knife
• •Fork for pricking

Instructions

1. 1

   Cream butter and sugar

   Set the oven to 150C/130C fan. Line a 20cm square tin with baking parchment, leaving an overhang on two sides so you can lift the whole slab out later. Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat them together with a wooden spoon until they're pale and a little fluffy. Not whipped to within an inch of their lives, just properly combined and lightened. Three or four minutes by hand. The butter should look creamy, not greasy.

   The butter is the whole story here. Use the best you can find. A proper farmhouse butter, slightly yellow, with a faint sweetness to it. If your butter tastes of nothing in a teaspoon, your shortbread will taste of nothing too.
2. 2

   Add the flours

   Sift the plain flour, rice flour, and salt over the butter and sugar. Bring it together with a wooden spoon at first, then your hands, working it just until it forms a soft, slightly crumbly dough. Stop the moment it comes together. Overworking shortbread develops the gluten and turns it tough, which is the opposite of what you want. You're after something that crumbles, not something that bends.

   The rice flour is the secret. It gives shortbread its sandy, melt-on-the-tongue texture. Semolina works too and gives a slightly more rustic crunch. Either is good. Don't skip it for all plain flour.
3. 3

   Press into the tin

   Tip the dough into the prepared tin. Press it down evenly with your fingers, then smooth the top with the back of a spoon or the bottom of a glass. You want it level and compact, about a centimetre thick. Prick the surface all over with a fork, right down to the base of the tin. This isn't decoration, it stops the shortbread from rising and cracking in the oven.

4. 4

   Score and chill

   Score the surface into sixteen fingers with a sharp knife, cutting through about halfway. Don't slice all the way through. Then put the tin in the fridge for at least twenty minutes. This is not optional. Cold dough holds its shape in the oven and gives you that proper short, snappy texture. Warm dough spreads and softens. Trust me on this.

5. 5

   Bake until pale gold

   Bake on the middle shelf for thirty-five to forty minutes. You're looking for the palest gold, the colour of straw rather than toast. The edges might be a shade deeper than the middle, which is fine. Shortbread that's gone properly brown has gone too far. Trust your nose: when the kitchen smells of warm butter and biscuit tin, you're close.

   Every oven lies a little. Check at thirty minutes the first time you make these. You can always give them another five, but you can't take colour back.
6. 6

   Dust and cut

   Take the tin from the oven and dust the top generously with caster sugar while it's still warm. The sugar will catch on the buttery surface and stay there. Now, while the shortbread is still soft and warm, cut along your scored lines with a sharp knife to make sixteen fingers. Leave them in the tin to cool completely. They firm up as they go, from soft and yielding to that proper short, sandy snap.

Chef Tips

• •The butter is everything. This is the recipe to spend money on. A proper unsalted butter from a dairy you trust will make shortbread that tastes of cream and grass and the cow it came from. Cheap butter makes cheap shortbread, and you'll wonder why you bothered.
• •Resist the urge to bake them dark. Pale gold is right. Anything browner and you've lost the delicacy that makes shortbread shortbread. They should look almost underdone when you take them out. The colour deepens slightly as they cool.
• •These keep beautifully in a tin lined with greaseproof paper for up to two weeks, and they're often better on the third day than the first. The butter settles, the texture firms, the flavour deepens. A proper biscuit tin is one of the more useful things you can have in a kitchen.
• •If you want to make them feel like Christmas without complicating them, add the finely grated zest of one small orange or half a lemon to the butter and sugar. That's as far as I'd go. Anything more and you're making a different biscuit.

Advance Preparation

• •The dough can be made a day ahead, pressed into the tin, and kept in the fridge until you're ready to bake. Add five minutes to the baking time if cooking from very cold.
• •Baked shortbread keeps in an airtight tin for up to two weeks. Layer the fingers between sheets of greaseproof paper to stop them sticking together.
• •The dough freezes well, pressed into the tin and wrapped tightly, for up to two months. Bake from frozen, adding ten minutes to the cooking time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Nutrition Information

1 serving (about 42g)