Mike and I decided that it would be a nice gesture to give cookies as gifts this Christmas. We even purchased the most gigantic cookie sheet I have ever seen (it completely fills our oven). After procuring lots of butter and sugar, we set about making glorious shortbreads. Though I knew there wasn’t a whole lot to shortbreads anyways, we chose this recipe based completely on its lack of ingredients.

Shortbreads (modified from this recipe)

Ingredients (makes a TON of cookies, we estimate around 150)

• 5.5 cups of butter, softened
• 3 cups of white sugar
• 12 cups of sifted all-purpose flour (though we used cake flour because that’s what we had)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (though our oven is hot, so we reduced it to 325 F)
2. In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Stir in the flour by hand until the dough is smooth. Extra flour can be added if the dough is not stiff enough to roll
3. On a (very) floured surface, roll dough to 1/4 inch thickness and cut into desired shapes. Lacking cookie cutters, we used a standard shot glass.
4. Bake for ~7 minutes. This really depends on your oven and how dark you want your cookies. I really recommend doing a small test batch because the original recipe says 12 – 15 minutes, but after only 8 our cookies were a tad on the overcooked side.
5. Cool cookies on cookie sheet for a few minutes then move them to a wire cooling rack (if you have one, we don’t)

Icing (modified from this recipe)

Ingredients

• 2/3 cups of butter, softened
• 4 cups of icing sugar
• 2 tbsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• lots of food colouring

Directions

1. Cream everything together until smooth and fluffy
2. We put it in a ziplock type bag with a corner cut off to pipe the icing

I think they turned out quite well, after the first mishap with the overcooking (but that can be easily avoided). We are packaging them up in little chinese takeout-esque boxes that we made last night. I’ll post photos of the finished product when all is said an done. 

I will also be posting photos of the finished knitting projects soon.