You know, these are the cookies you take to a gathering, and everyone kind of looks at them like, meh, they look kind of sad and lame, but then they bite into one, and shazam! They are blown away!
I wasn’t expecting to like these as much as I do, either. The recipe is from Marion Cunningham’s The Breakfast Book, which I love to death and have had for a million years. It wasn’t until the other day, though, that I tried the Ginger Shortbread recipe. I try not to think how much better my life would have been if I had discovered this recipe sooner.
They are super easy to make, and there are no real “specialty” ingredients, so, yes, you can just whip these up whenever you feel like it. Danger!
GINGER SHORTBREAD from The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham
Yields 2 dozen wedges
Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 sticks butter, softened (I used unsalted, and I didn’t really soften it)
Preheat the oven to 325F.
Dig up two 8″ round cake pans.
Mix together all the dry ingredients (i.e., everything but the butter) in a large bowl. Cut the butter into small chunks and drop them into the dry mix. Use a pastry blender or your fingers and mix the butter in like you’re making a pie dough. You want to blend it in so there are no large chunks of butter. Here’s a tip: I wear surgical gloves to blend the butter. Does that sound crazy or creepy? Who cares, because it works great!
Divide the dough between the two cake pans and press into the pans (again, surgical gloves!). Prick the dough all over with a fork at 1/2″ intervals.
Bake 40-45 minutes or until lightly browned around the edges. Remove pans from the oven, let cool for a few minutes, then cut each pan into 12 wedges. Carefully lift from pans and cool the shortbread on racks. Yum yum in your tum tum.
We have winners of the index tabs! As you can see, I wrote all the participant names on these tiny little TidBit pieces of paper (also courtesy of JetPens!) and drew two names: Jolynn is the winner of the camera index tabs (Jolynn, please e-mail me your mailing address!) and Azizah the bunnies! Woohoo!!
