One of the biggest things I wanted to convey when writing Good Food No Stress was to use one recipe for more than just one dish. Here’s one of them! Make a double batch of shortbread and get two delicious but very different treats!
The recipe is below but hear it on LMFM’s Late Lunch here
Salted Caramel Millionaire’s Shortbread
Another great way to justify making a salted caramel!
For the shortbread:
Ingredients
125 g Flour
85g Butter, cold & cut into squares
30g Icing Sugar
Salt
Method:
Preheat the oven to 180˚C, 160˚C Fan
Sieve the flour into a bowl and add the icing sugar & salt.
Rub the butter into the mixture with your finger tips until it resembles breadcrumbs
Knead the dough on a floured surface for a couple of minutes and leave to rest for 10 mins.
Roll out the dough, it should not be sticky so you will not need to flour the surface.
Place on a baking sheet.and bake for 8-12 mins. Allow to cool before pouring salted caramel over.
Salted Caramel Sauce
225g sugar, caster or granulated
75ml water
110g butter
175ml regular or double cream
Place the sugar and the water in a saucepan over a medium heat and stir as it heats up to dissolve the sugar.
Once the sugar has dissolved stir in the butter, turn the heat up to high and cook for about 10 minutes until it turns a toffee colour. Do not stir the pan though you might need to swirl the pan occasionally if you see it turning golden on one side of the pan before the other. Once it is a rich golden toffee colour tale it off the heat for a moment and stir in half the cream. When the bubbles die down, stir in the rest of the cream and the salt to taste (it will depend on the type of salt used and of course your taste how much you’ll need).
Pour over the shortbread and place in the fridge for at least 30mins.
To Finish:
180g of chocolate I like to use dark (70%) chocolate but you can use milk or white chocolate.
Melt and pour evenly over the shortbread topped with caramel. Allow to set before cutting
Lemon Thumbprint Gems
Once you have mastered the shortbread recipe you can choose to make or buy the lemon curd for this simple but delicious afternoon treat or dessert.
Ingredients:
125g butter, softened
30g caster sugar
½ an egg yolk
1 tsp lemon juice
125g plain flour
25g ground almonds
10g cornflour
6-7 tablespoons of lemon curd
Method:
Preheat oven to 180C. Line or grease 2 baking sheets.
Beat together the butter and sugar. Add the egg yolk, lemon zest and juice. You can use an electric mixer here, but we aren’t really creaming so its not necessary
Fold in the flour, almonds and cornflour. Do this gently – it should be just combined. It’s very sticky so it goes in the fridge to chill for an hour.
Remove the dough from the fridge and roll into cherry tomato sized balls. Space these evenly on your baking sheets. Make an indentation in each biscuit (see the picture below). Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden.
The moment they come out of the oven fill the indentation on each biscuit with 1/2 a teaspoon of lemon curd. Then transfer them from the baking sheet to wire racks to cool.