All Butter Shortbread

December is now creeping past and it's time to do one of our usual Christmas treats. Shortbread is something that is just right for this time of year. A recent trip to Scotland has only heightened my seasonal desire for this traditional treat! Rather than just opting for the usual recipe, I decided to take a little longer over this one - and it has been a while in the baking: 8 kg of shortbread mix has been made to multiple recipes, 9 different flavours have been tested and different shapes have been baked. The winning four flavours are listed below, along with the best base recipe.

There are at least three ingredients in traditional shortbread and generally all in a fixed ratio. 1 part sugar (normally caster, sometimes icing), 2 parts butter and 3 parts flour. Its that last part that differs from recipe to recipe (according to whose 'Scottish grandmother' you ask). The flour part is generally subdivided into two parts plain flour and one part something else: semolina, ground rice, rice flour or corn flour. The test bakes with semolina and ground rice came out wonderfully crumbly but after a few chews left something reminiscent of eating biscuits on a sandy beach. I even tried using all plain flour but this came out more like a biscuit than shortbread!

Recipe:

• 125g sugar 
• 250g butter 
• 250g plain flour 
• 125g corn flour 
• pinch of salt 

Plus choose one flavour:

• 1 tsp vanilla extract 
• Zest of one lemon
• 3 tsp green tea, ground
• 25g very fine milk chocolate (the sort used for making fancy hot chocolate) plus 50g dark cooking chocolate, chopped.

1. Rub in the butter with the base ingredients. In my case I just put it all into the kenwood. 
2. Once it reaches a fine powdery consistency add the flavouring and continue to work until it comes together as a nice dough.
3. Roll out on a well floured surface to a thickness of 1/2 cm and cut into circles. If the dough is too stiff to roll, knead it for a few moments to help ease up the mix (you can even knead it in batches if its really stiff). The lazy alternative at this point is to roll a thick sausage of dough and slice it thinly but it is hard to get a perfectly round biscuit.
4. Bake on a greaseproof sheet at 170 degrees for 15-20 minutes, until starting to colour. The mix will spread a little so give enough space between the rounds!
5. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

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Pickled Onions

I have never pickled anything before. It has been on my to-do list for years (my culinary to-do list is diverse, mostly in my head and only partially shared with a few people). Whilst at the farm shop I discovered they had pickling onions in stock. Suddenly a reckless urge overcame me as I looked at this box full of shiny, brown onions and before I knew it I was asking my wife to pick up vinegar on the way home from work!

Many of the things on my to-do list involve traditional methods of preseving: smoking, curing, salting, pickling, fermenting... I want to do them all! At some point I'll get round to trying some more of these, and when I do pictures will follow. But for now, on to the onions...

Ingredients:

• 600g pickling onions (small)
• 40g salt
• 400ml vinegar
• 3 blades of mace
• 1 tsp juniper berries
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 lump of cinnamon stick
• 1 tsp of corriander seeds
• 3 bay leaves
• 1/2 tsp cloves

1. Step one - peel the onions. Lots of them. Those who know me will realise this was a mistake. I start crying before I finish chopping even one onion. I am not sure what possessed me to buy an entire pile of them to peel at the same time. I do have one avoidance method - goggles. A snorkel mask lives in the kitchen cupboard (much to the amusement of my brother in law who decided to do the washing up in it for some reason). Despite this, I managed to peel them all in only an hour or so. Right about this point, shop-bought pickled onions looked really tempting!
2. Step two - Salt the onions and leave overnight to draw-out as much excess moisture as possible.
3. Step three - Rinse and drain. Most of the salt should have dissolved in onion juice and the onions should be ready for pickling.
4. Step four - Add the spices to the vinegar and pack with the onions into jam jars. (Some recipes involve boiling the vinegar and spices and leaving to cool, and some just involve it all sitting in the jars. I opted for the throw-it-all-in-a-jar method.)
5. Step five - Sit in a cupboard for at least 3 weeks.  Results to be announced...

Update - The Results (5 weeks later):

The onions are nicely pickled and perfect with some mature cheese (gooey brie in this case) and crusty bread. The onions have browned slightly from using black peppercorns, but the flavours from the spices are coming out nicely. I might make half the next batch with chilli to give it some more kick, but I shall have no problem with polishing-off these first!

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