Learning 2 Bake from Scratch – LXIII

PB&J Shortbread

This was triple inspired: My “early out of the oven so it stays moist” peanut butter cookies reminded Kay of shortbread (because they collapsed). Ari wanted me to vet a recipe for shortbread cookies with icing before she went to all the work of making them; I have not seen the recipe, yet. It was cold and snowing, which almost requires baking something.

The peanut butter shortbread is from the cafe sucre farine, which was an Internet search result. (From the second page; you do know that the first page is all paid for, right?)

Peanut Butter Shortbread
From: the cafe sucre farine

3/4 cup very soft butter
1/3 cup peanut butter
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
2 cups AP flour

Do the things (cream butter and sugar, add everything but flour and mix a bit more, add the flour) then bake at 350.

The dough was very crumbly and I wanted to roll these out and cut them into rectangles, so I added 1/3 cup water (that measuring cup was handy). Half that probably would have been fine.

After my gritty peanut butter cookies, I weighed the 2/3 cup of sugar and substituted that weight of powdered sugar. If you’re going to go with icing, I recommend less sugar. I’ll try 1/3 cup, next time.

After rolling it out about 1/4″ thick (which was very easy; 1/3 cup water was excessive), I cut 1.5″x3″ rectangles. Using the bench scraper to cut them worked much better than a knife, which was dragging the dough into ragged edges.

The icing was the grape jelly left in the jar heated until the pectin gave up and sifted powdered sugar until it was thick. Roughly equal amounts, I think. It’s SO sticky – even in the refrigerator! It definitely needed more powdered sugar to make it more “icing”-y and less “jelly”-y. Starting from juice may work better.

They’re very tasty, if a bit sweet. And, no, the previous collapsed cookies were not shortbread. This has a very different texture, although about the same thickness.