Cream To Butter To Shortbread

Written by Diana - December 23, 2012 0 Comments

If you want to do a project with your child to make a gift for their grandmother or other relatives or their class at school, this would be a great bonding experience. I’ve had a lot of fun lately making butter from whipping cream. I use Snowville’s Whipping Cream from grassfed cows because I like the way they do things. Then I take the butter and use it to make Shortbread Cookies. I did it with a food processor which can make it safe and quick to work with their attention span.

Let the cream sit at room temperature until it comes up to around 55 deg Celsius.

Pour into the food processor up to the liquid line and let ‘er rip.

The cream will become thicker and thicker turning into whipped cream, keep going.

It will be thicker and then start to separate into buttermilk and butter – it’s amazing, but pretty cool.

The food processor will rock a little as the butter sticks to the blade and separates from the buttermilk.

Drain the buttermilk into a container – use this in butter milk biscuits, or pancakes, or any buttermilk recipe.

Rinse the butter in cold water to remove any buttermilk left, squeezing and reshaping it to get out the buttermilk.

Place the butter into a container that will hold the butter snugly, and use plastic wrap on top to keep the air out and place in the fridge.

You could stop here, with the butter and buttermilk, or you could go on to make shortbread cookies using the butter. First though, clean out the food processor because you can use it for the next step. Butter cookies has always been one of my favorites. I regret that I can not stay away from them. They’re so buttery, they melt in your mouth and are so easy to make. My biggest problem is waiting for the cookies to cool so they don’t crumble when I pick them up. The shortbread cookies are made with quite a bit of butter, so keep them refrigerated.

This shortbread recipe is from The Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen Cookie Lover’s Cookbook. While this is a binder FULL of cookie recipes the shortbread recipe is one of my favorites and one I love to bring out during the holidays when all diets are ignored for a little bit. This shortbread uses cake flour which makes it dissolve when it touches your tongue. It doesn’t matter how careful I am with the shortbread taking it out of the pan is difficult. If you use a cake pan it falls apart when you take it out. If you use a springform mold it is a little easier to slip your knife under the cookie and loosen it up, but no matter, it will still crumble here and there as you try to move it to the wire racks to cool. That’s the very nature of shortbread – it is a melt in your mouth buttery goodness treat that is hard to resist. Showcasing your homemade butter in homemade butter cookies – fantastic and easy.

Scottish Shortbread

Prep time

20 mins

Cook time

40 mins

Total time

1 hour

After making your own butter from cream, the next step is to make a buttery scottish shortbread cookie.

Author: Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen Cookie Lover’s Cookbook

Recipe type: Buttery Shortbread Cookie

Cuisine: Dessert

Serves: 32

Ingredients

1½ cups cake flour(not self-rising)
½ cup sugar
¼ tsp salt
1½ cups butter (3 sticks) cut into pieces and softened

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325 F.
In large bowl, with wire whisk, mix both flours, sugar, and salt.
Knead butter into flour mixture is well blended and holds together.
(Or, in food processor with knife blade attached, pulse dry ingredients to blend. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.)
Divide dough in half.
With hand, pat evenly onto bottoms of two ungreased 8-inch round cake pans.
With fork, prick dough all over to make attractive pattern.
Bake until golden, about 40 minutes, rotating pans between upper and lower oven racks halfway through.
Remove from oven; immediately run knife around sides of pans to loosen shortbread, then cut each shortbread round into 16 wedges.
Cool completely in pans on wire racks.
When cool, with small metal spatula, carefully remove cookies from pans.
Store shortbread in an airtight container up to 5 days, or freeze up to 3 months.

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