I reckon I’ve embraced my Canadian life well; I love watching hockey, I would never fuck with the Maple mafia and I always have a stash of some sort of edible around.
But hot, strong tea with a splash of milk still runs through my veins and there must be a biscuit to go with it (as such is British law). Be it a choccy biccy, a digestive or a shortbread, I’ll never choose a favourite. These are my babies, how very dare you.
We can thank my Grandparents for my love of all biscuits great and small. I think we can also thank them for the genetics that gave me depression and asthma but lets just start with the food mkay?
I aim to run the full gambit on biscuit recipes; here we are with shortbread, probably the simplest kind. Easy as shit and done two ways to please at least two of your multiple personalities; chocolate chip, and lemon with cardamom.
What you need:
- 300g of all purpose flour
- 200g of butter, chilled and cut into cubes
- 100g sugar, plus a little extra for sprinkling
- 1/2 a lemon of zest
- 1.5 tsp of cardamom (if you’ve got pods, 10 of them with seeds ground fine)
- 50g semi sweet mini chocolate chips
What to do:
Mix your flour, sugar and butter into a large bowl (if you need cup measurements then I suggest you google the conversions or you know, get with the program and weigh out your damn ingredients). Using your dainty little fingertips, rub the butter into the flour and sugar mix. Be sure to avoid using your palms as we’re going to have to handle this dough a fair amount and if you faff around with it too much now, you’ll be rolling out half melted butter and you’ll cry.
Boujee tip of the day! I keep a small jar of used vanilla pods and sugar; over time the sugar is flavoured by the vanilla and you’re left with vanilla sugar (yes bitch). I used 50g of vanilla sugar in this recipe, and 50g of regular but don’t panic if you’re not high maintenance like moi; this will taste brilliant without that added dose of fancy.
When the mixture resembles breadcrumbs, take half of it into a separate bowl. For those of us with a scale, your mix is around 600g, so 300g in each bowl IS indeed half WOW MATHS RIGHT I KNOW.
In one bowl tip your chocolate chips, and in the other, your lemon zest and cardamom. Mix each up and choose one to work with first. We need to make this floury mess into a dough, so start squeezing it together with your hands. The heat in your palms will now help us to make this into an actual dough. Start squeezing (not kneading because bitch we’re not baking bread). You’ll notice it starts to hold up the more you squeeze, and eventually you’ll be able to tip it out onto a lightly floured surface and roll it out to around a 1/2cm thick.
Cut these buggers into whatever shape you like; I have a round ravioli stamp that works well but you do you, I ain’t the shape police. When you’ve cut them out, lay them onto a lined baking tray and prick the surface of each one with a fork a few times to make sure they don’t rise up too much.
Once you’ve done this for all of your dough (other flavour included), put them in the fridge on their trays by balancing them on top of some cans of things and a box off eggs and pray that’s good enough. They’ll need to chill out for about 20 minutes so start heating the oven up to 340F.
After the chill time and when your oven is ready, sprinkle the biscuits with some more sugar and bake for about 15-20 minutes. You’ll notice them starting to turn a very light golden brown when they’re done. Bring them out of the oven and leave them on the tray to cool for a good 10 minutes or so before inhaling them.
Chief, you just made biscuits. Actual biscuits (I’m looking at you, ‘murica).
Pop the kettle on, brew, dunk, munch, enjoy.
Munch Kitchen 