Diseased Lemon Shortbreads

This is a pretty old, hand-me-down recipe for shortbread. You can see why it's "3, 2, 1".

Ingredients

• 300g plain flour
• 200g butter
• 100g sugar
• A lemon, like you
• Optional: icing sugar

Method

Step one: get a nasty stinking cold

Step two: cream butter and sugar together until it's light and fluffy

Step three: grate in the zest of one lemon

Step four: take a moment to admire your good quality grater, and reflect on the vanishing of your youth

Step five: add the flour, one or two tablespoons at a time. Ditch your spatula, keep going, and use your hands. Gwarn, gettem in there.

Step six: when it starts coming together in a dough, STOP ADDING THE FLOUR. I was surprised by how much flour was left. The lemon has an effect on the mixture, so you might find you use more of the flour if you're doing plain ones, without lemon. Make a sausage shape, and wrap it tightly in cling film. Let it chill in the fridge for an hour. Maybe it wants a joint. Don't judge. Don't rush it.

Step seven: enhotten your oven to 180C. Slightly lower if it's fan assisted. Line a baking sheet or two with greaseproof paper

Step eight: Get your sausage out (steady on) and unwrap it. Careful, now! You'll probably want a sharpish knife for this next bit. My silicone thingy (really, stop it) has little measurements on it, so I can line up my sausage and cut it into even slices (roughly 1cm thick)

Step nine: Place these gently on your lined baking sheet. Allow some room for them to spread a bit.

OPTIONAL: leave them there a bit to come up to room temperature, and then make a dent in the centre of each one. (Did you wash your hands?) Fill it with a dollop (technical measurement for "about a teaspoon") of lemon curd. It could be home-made even, if you are into that, but I just bought a jar from the shop.

These beauties can now be baked for 8 minutes.

It's OK if they come out without colour. Leave them on the hot baking sheet and transfer to a cooling rack after five or ten minutes.

OPTIONAL: Juice the lemon, and mix with 4-5 tablespoons of icing sugar. Drizzle this over the curdy biscuits.

Now you are free to enjoy eating the entire batch yourself, because no one else wants your cold.

UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!

Notes:

Shortbread is simultaneously really easy, and really tricky. One batch comes out perfect, and I think, gosh, I could be on MasterChef. The next doesn't come out quite so well. Still edible, though.

The acidity of the lemon does something to the dough, dries it out somehow. So you might have quite a bit of flour left. Go by feel. You'll know if it's not right, if it feels sticky, or if it's too crumbly and doesn't hold together well.

If it is too sandy, you can fix it by mixing in some more butter, or a smidge of milk. It's a pain in the arse, though, so it's better to add the flour gradually at that stage, and switch to using your hands as soon as it starts coming together, so you can stop adding flour at the right point.

Do not skip the chilling stage! It does make a difference.

You can swap out the lemon for a drop of vanilla extract, but go easy on it. Don't do what I did and literally, actually, drop it in. The mix will be ruined.

I actually prefer the lemon version.

The sausage method is great, because you aren't having to rework the dough and roll it out again to avoid wasting scraps. The dough can suffer from over-handling, I think, so this helps you avoid that.

When you are slicing, don't be stingy. If they are too thin, they won't cook right. This is where I fall down a bit, I think. Go slightly thicker than you think you need.

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Thank you for reading, and bon appetit!