The holidays are right around the corner and it’s time for high schoolers to step up their game and bring something to the family function. In this article students bake and review a take on old fashioned shortbread from The New York Times post by Genevie Ko.
With an impressive 5-star rating, the recipe offers a unique combination of ingredients that is sure to impress your relatives this holiday season.
While it is not the most popular cookie, it has a rich history in Europe where it started as a common pastry used with the scraps of dough from other baked goods. As time went on Shortbread’s ingredients got replaced with higher quality goods that would quickly cement the cookie as a staple dessert during holidays.
Recipe instructions here
Yield: 24 cookies
- ½cup/82 grams dried sour cherries
- ⅓cup/50 grams diced candied orange peel
- ¼cup/50 grams bourbon or rye (1/4 tsp replaced with pure vanilla extract and a simple syrup made from 1 cup of water and 3 tbs of sugar)
- ¾cup/168 grams unsalted butter, at room temperature
- ½cup/100 grams sugar
- ½teaspoon fine salt
- 1 large egg, separated
- 1½cups/ 195 grams all-purpose flour½cup/50 grams sliced blanched almonds
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Exact measurements that even The Great British Bake-Off could be proud of. (Sage Cordero)
Each ingredient was relatively easy to buy as one trip to Trader Joes had everything the recipe called for. Since Alcohol is the only ingredient that is not accessible the recipe was tweaked to ensure that it could be followed. The alcohol was supposed to be used to add flavor to the fruit and be used as a glaze for the cookie dough, pure vanilla extract and a simple syrup made a fine substitute.
To get an opinion on the cookies they were given out across school and participants were asked for their thoughts.
Teachers who were given samples were more receptive and had similar responses to the batch with comments such as, “If I saw this on the table, I would go for another.” (Mr Liu) and “You could sell that” (Lunch staff).
While very general, the feedback from 6 teachers and staff came out to a solid 8.3/10. With the only consistent complaint among the adults being that “there was no consistent shape.”
On the other hand students who received the samples had stronger opinions. With an average rating of 7.1/10, students who were interviewed gave mixed reactions. Some students commented that the dried cherries had too much impact on the cookie that overshadowed the oranges. Others mentioned a bad aftertaste in the cookie I suspect was due to too much vanilla extract.
From a first time bakers perspective I would rate this a
7/10 Student Affordability
10/10 Ease of Bake
8/10 Taste
This recipe is easy to follow and hard to mess up as the dough is very forgiving so long and the correct amount of butter is used.
One fatal mistake made during the process was using too little butter, to mitigate this more butter was incorporated overtime, but the dough had become sticky and hard to work with in the long run.
Despite that blunder the cookies had come out with their taste and texture unaffected. The only problem was how inconsistent the shape of each cookie was.
All in all this is a great cookie to bring to family holidays that is sure to surprise relatives and win over the hearts of aunts and uncles.
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