Lemon and Coconut Shortbread

I've been in the kitchen almost all day today making lots of shortbread and I also made some casserole (but that wasn't for me). I don't particularly like shortbread because of the texture, it's a bit too buttery and crumbly for my liking but, it's a fun and easy thing to make if you want a relaxing bake. There's no egg in this and again, all of the dairy ingredients are able to be swapped out for dairy free alternatives.

However, I would avoid using any form of coconut based butter in this because of the coconut that is already in there. The taste would be pretty over-powering.

Part 1: Making the Shortbread Dough

Ingredients:

• 125g Butter
• 55g Brown Sugar
• 180g Plain Flour
• 1 Lemon
• 50g Desiccated Coconut

How To:

1. In a mixer, mix together the butter and sugar
2. Juice the lemon and grate off the zest. Then add this to the butter and sugar mixture, adding the coconut straight after
3. Mix once more and then add the flour
4. Form a dough and then press it into an air-tight container
5. Chill the dough in the fridge for fifteen minutes

Part 2: Making the Biscuits

How To:

1. Take your chilled dough from the fridge after 15 minutes of chilling
2. Preheat your oven to 180/C and prepare an oven tray with greaseproof paper
3. Roll out the dough to the thickness of an iPhone
4. Use a cookie cutter of your choice to cut the dough into shapes - I used Christmas trees and stars
5. Lay them out on the oven tray and bake them for up to 15 minutes (the best way to check is that the ends have gone a nice dark brown colour)
6. Let them cool

***

While they're cooling (don't you dare put them in the fridge yet), you can get to work on the icing, so keep those cookie cutters and if you need to, give them a good rinse.

Let's move on to how this is meant to taste:

Your meant to have a lot of lemon and a small amount of coconut. Sometimes, I switch out the coconut for ginger, but then you want to halve the amount of ginger you put in there so things don't taste too gingery.

Other alternative flavours I like to make are:

Lime and Coconut (optional splash of apple juice for sweetness and to cut through the lime) = this flavour is better in the summer I feel, it's rather refreshing and the lime is played out the same way as the lemon, but there is about 20-30g more coconut

Ground Coffee and (Dark) Chocolate = When you swap out the coconut for cocoa powder and 1 lemon becomes 2 tablespoons of medium strength ground coffee, this can make a sensational flavour which I actually like quite a bit - especially if you were to use very dark chocolate powder

Raspberry and (Powdered) White Chocolate = I don't personally like this flavour but it can be very tasty for people who aren't keen on strong flavours or are allergic to coconut. Squishing out about 50g of raspberries can make your dough very wet and so, you need to balance that out by using white chocolate in a powder form if you can - it's the same amount of coconut you would use in the original recipe

If you can't find powdered white chocolate then using white hot chocolate powder is a great alternative.

***

Part 3: Decoration

Ingredients:

• 1kg White Fondant Icing
• 4-6 Tubes of Colourful Writing Icing

How To:

1. Roll out your icing, getting it as thin/thick as you like it (though I try to get it the same thickness as the biscuit)
2. Grab the same cookie cutters and cut out your icing shapes
3. Use some writing icing to stick your icing shapes to the biscuits
4. Design using your writing icing
5. Refrigerate to set the writing icing when all are finished

Conclusion

This took me a really long time to do. I started after breakfast and then didn't finish until way after I eat lunch. So you probably want to do this one when you've got the time to do the decorating. I made the mistake of using quite a lot of smaller cookie cutters to make the biscuits so I had lots to decorate.

Anyways, I've made way too many biscuits...

Thanks for reading!