Shortbread!
Oct. 19th, 2013 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violsvaI am having an anxiety upswing because of a lot of things but mostly work, and I spent today happy but with way too much nervous energy. But I have an apartment and my Yuletide assignment as it turns out is an awesome excuse to write the fic I've wanted to write about these characters for more than a year now, and tomorrow there will be steampunk. And tonight there is shortbread, by the following process:
Realize you are hungry. Look in fridge and cupboards. Realize that possibly it's time to go grocery shopping for real, rather than at the Shoppers on the corner.
Poke around on food blogs.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remember that oven cooks hot and lower that a little.
Get out flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and a clementine (because why not, and even though you don't have a reamer it should be manageable).
Measure out half a cup of butter. Drop rest of butter on floor. Blaspheme.
Leave butter alone for a bit to get to room temp.
Add a cup of flour and a quarter cup of sugar and some cinnamon. Break up butter and make piecrust (that is, mash everything with the fork until it's a bunch of little crumbs, with the butter mostly evenly distributed. Or until your arm hurts enough that you say 'screw it' and stop anyway).*
Using another fork and your fingers, inexpertly juice clementine into a saucer until you have about 2 tablespoons or 1/8 cup. Swear never to tellknumpify about this.**
Mush everything together with your fingers. Fingers are necessary here, because the heat helps melt and distribute the rest of the butter. Press into a ball.
Flour the counter. Place dough on the flour. Flatten.
Cut into weird triangular shapes because you don't have any cookie cutters. Arrange on greased baking sheet. Place in oven. Set timer for ten minutes.
Place dishes in sink. Consider dishes. Consider timer. Clean up remaining ingredients and the flour.
Consider dishes. Wash dishes. Rejoice in virtue and the smell of baking cookies.
Take cookies out of oven. Poke. Consider golden brownness (should be very little, just around the edges). Maybe put them back in for two minutes. Leave tray on top of stove for a couple minutes.
Remove cookies to plate. Remove tray and spatula to sink, because the first rule of the kitchen is that there are always more dishes.
Eat.
Having tried them: the orange and cinnamon are more of a suggestion, but they're very good. Hard to go wrong with shortbread.
*This is more formally called 'cutting cold butter into flour' and it is one of the more irritating tasks in baking. People who do it regularly have pastry cutters, but they're hard to clean.
**knumpify reads this blog.
Realize you are hungry. Look in fridge and cupboards. Realize that possibly it's time to go grocery shopping for real, rather than at the Shoppers on the corner.
Poke around on food blogs.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remember that oven cooks hot and lower that a little.
Get out flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and a clementine (because why not, and even though you don't have a reamer it should be manageable).
Measure out half a cup of butter. Drop rest of butter on floor. Blaspheme.
Leave butter alone for a bit to get to room temp.
Add a cup of flour and a quarter cup of sugar and some cinnamon. Break up butter and make piecrust (that is, mash everything with the fork until it's a bunch of little crumbs, with the butter mostly evenly distributed. Or until your arm hurts enough that you say 'screw it' and stop anyway).*
Using another fork and your fingers, inexpertly juice clementine into a saucer until you have about 2 tablespoons or 1/8 cup. Swear never to tell
knumpify about this.**Mush everything together with your fingers. Fingers are necessary here, because the heat helps melt and distribute the rest of the butter. Press into a ball.
Flour the counter. Place dough on the flour. Flatten.
Cut into weird triangular shapes because you don't have any cookie cutters. Arrange on greased baking sheet. Place in oven. Set timer for ten minutes.
Place dishes in sink. Consider dishes. Consider timer. Clean up remaining ingredients and the flour.
Consider dishes. Wash dishes. Rejoice in virtue and the smell of baking cookies.
Take cookies out of oven. Poke. Consider golden brownness (should be very little, just around the edges). Maybe put them back in for two minutes. Leave tray on top of stove for a couple minutes.
Remove cookies to plate. Remove tray and spatula to sink, because the first rule of the kitchen is that there are always more dishes.
Eat.
Having tried them: the orange and cinnamon are more of a suggestion, but they're very good. Hard to go wrong with shortbread.
*This is more formally called 'cutting cold butter into flour' and it is one of the more irritating tasks in baking. People who do it regularly have pastry cutters, but they're hard to clean.
**
knumpify reads this blog.