Simple Shortbread, Total Fail

My newest must have kitchen tool, sort of.

  So I have missed you all, I imagine that you are all "where the heck is the crazy lady?"  And I would have to say "who me?  Crazy?"  And then you would roll your eyes, and I would sort of just stand there, it is just how it is you know?

  Anyway I have been at my new job for over a week now, and I love it!  But, I feel like an idiot, like I will never get it all.  I also miss all the time I had to bake and blog.  And so tonight I am jumping on to share a really simple cookie.  One that didn't turn out so well for me, but you might have better luck.  Anyway, life is really good, busy but good, and I hope to be back more often to read and blog. So here is a post I wrote way back last year when I was hoping to have a new cookie to share, then I never did, because it was so bad!  Oh well, could be worse.

 So here you go.

  I had a dream. It was a simple dream. It involved me getting a new kitchen gadget and me using it and me making something so awesome and amazing that people would want my autograph; they would be like "you are the best thing since sliced bread!" And I would be all "duh was there ever any doubt?" And that would be wonderful!

Never knew you could get this in the regular store, I was all panicked thinking I would have to go to a specialty store.

    In real life; I got a new shortbread baking pan. I was all ready to become the famous shortbread baking lady. I even bought rice flour to make it. And well; it was no dream come true if you must know. So basically what happened was I used two cups of butter and ended up with a crumbling pan of half baked and half raw shortbread.

I just lightly oiled the pan.

The flour stuck on in globs so I had to use a pastry brush to get some of it off.

 It was not a good day. I almost cried, I was all "how am I ever going to show my face in public again?" And then I tossed out almost all of it and sat on the sofa and pouted for a while. It was one of those things where I look back now and I know how I screwed up but I am not in the mood to try again, yet. So I figure if nothing else I have a post to share my pictures of failure of and it will fill some void in your heart. You know the void, the one where you need to see how badly I can screw up and still come back for more.

See the dough was so soft and I bet you could even pipe it.  Great now I want to try piping it.

You can totally see how over full my pan is, but I was not going to stop.

It's what I do people; I think of you. But if we could have a moment of silence for those two cups of butter that I will never get back that would greatly help with my healing.

Thank you.

 So I got this pan at the kitchen store and it had a recipe in it, but it was sort of vague. So I went on line to see if I could find out more about the pan and the recipe. Well for some reason the pan wasn't even on the manufactures site, which should have been a big sign that something was up. But I forged on I looked on google to see if there was anything special I had to do to prepare my pan. In the end I figured that seasoning my pan couldn't hurt and that is what I did. I rubbed some vegetable oil on the pan and then sprinkled some flour on it to make sure nothing stuck.   Then I got to making the cookie dough.

See, I should have taken a bunch out.

It looked way worse in real life.

 Short bread cookies
found on the pan instructions

1/2 pound butter
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/2 cake flour
1/4 cup rice flour
1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt

Pre heat oven to 350, and season your pan.
Blend the butter until creamy, add icing sugar and salt, blend well.  Add rice flour and cake flour and blend well.  Add half of the all purpose flour and blend, add the rest of the flour and blend. Press the dough into the mold and bake until golden brown.

See all this was almost raw, I was so mad!

 So the first thing about this is that I have not used rice flour before and I thought that it was a neat idea and figured it would make for a nice smooth cookie. So  I measure out everything and mix it all together and that is when I notice how soft the dough is, the recipe says to press the dough into the pan and it was spreadable. Also the recipe didn't say how much it made so I figured I needed to put it all into the pan. But there was way too much. So instead of taking some out and doing two batched I smoothed it out and went ahead and baked the full pan. And that is where I messed up. I put the pan on a cookie sheet just to make sure that it would not over flow. But even after 30 minutes the middle was still sort of wet but the outside was getting dark. So I pulled the tray out and let it set to cool.

 I let it cool a few minutes then flipped the whole thing onto a cookie tray and it fell apart.  The middle was soft and not cooked and the outsides were really crusty.  I even cut it to try it.  Now I will admit it was a nice melt in your mouth soft short bread, or at least the few edges I ate were.  So I cut it up thinking it would set up, but it didn't.  So I took a few pieces to work and no one ate them.  I really cannot blame them.  Just means I need to try again, and I will and it will be amazing.  I won't add this recipe to my index yet until I figure it out, so stay tuned I may be brave enough again before 2014 you know.

This went to work, and it never got eaten.