Merry christmas shortbread

Lemon and macadamia shortbread

Merry christmas (and happy new year, that happened fast)! I know we’ve technically already posted something since christmas, but I was still in a food coma then so I don’t think it counted. I hope everyone had/is having a fun and delicious break. Getting to the point of this post, this year my family did both a christmas lunch and afternoon tea. Afternoon tea on christmas day is about as unnecessary as that third serve of pudding. Unnecessary or not though, I was in charge of supplying scones and shortbreads. Shortbread-wise I started with a recipe from here and made a few alterations. I ended up with lemon and macadamia shortbreads that looked a little like this…

IMG_5359

250 g butter (room temperature)
100 g caster sugar
300 g plain flour
90 g rice flour
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 cup macadamias
Rind of 1 lemon
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
- makes 32 festive shaped biscuits

  • Cream the butter and caster sugar.
  • Sift the flours into the butter mixture and add the lemon rind, mix well. On a side note when I moved a bit over a year ago I lost my sifter and haven’t gotten around to replacing it, so I’ve spent a year sifting flour through a super fine grater. If anyone thinks that sounds twice as time consuming, three times as tedious and half as effective as just going out and buying a new sifter, you’re right.
  • Mix in the lemon juice and vanilla essence. Before I added the lemon juice the mixture was really crumbly but once it was  added the extra liquid helped it to come together. I had thought that the extra liquid might might be too much, but it seemed to work well.

Crumbly dough

  • Mix the macadamias into the dough.
  • Knead and roll out on a flourered surface and then cut festive shapes.
  • Bake for approx 35 mins at 140 degrees.

Ready to bake

The star and christmas tree shaped cookie cutters were part of my birthday present from my friend PE (the Prominent Eurasian). He gave me a collection of cookie cutters, my favourites are the flamingo and zebra. How are you meant to know it’s a zebra and not a horse given that it’s a silhouette and has no stripes? That’s a very good question.

Mr Flamingo and Zebra

 

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