Shortbread

Randomly Awesome Sauce and I will make a large batch of cookies for him to bring to work to his coworkers. we decided that Valentine's Day was a good enough excuse to pull out Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and see if we can make a cookie.

We decided to make the Shortbread cookies on pages 714-715. We chose this recipe primarily because we could use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to create our Valentine's Day theme!

First thing is first...gather ingredients! Unfortunately, I did not quite have enough butter! I decided to improvise. I happened to have a left-over carton of whipping cream. So we made our own butter. See the pictures below:

Getting ready to whip!

For those of you who haven't used your stand mixer to make butter, ALWAYS cover with a cloth. If you don't, you will not have fun cleaning up the splatters that will be all over your kitchen. What? I didn't learn this from experience or anything.....

Finished butter!!!

A side-view of our mountain of butter!!

This recipe was simple to follow. The biggest trick is to refridgerate the dough between rolling it out or it gets too soft to work with. Some of these cookies I rolled out a bit too thin. Tip: Keep them nice and thick to that 1/4 of an inch thick! They are definitely better a bit thicker. However, the consensus was in: these cookies were great!! Junky Monkey had to request a few...just to make sure they were "still good." Awesome Sauce found them to be Delicious!

Dough out of the fridge!!

Making the cookies!

A tray right out of the oven.

The hearts are ready for their close-up!!

Finished cookie tray for Awesome Sauce's coworkers.

When Awesome Sauce took them to work he put a sign next to them saying: "Happy Valentine's Day from Awesome Sauce and The Clumsy Gourmet! Please tell us what you thought of the cookies!! Comments may be used on The Clumsy Gourmet's food blog" We asked for a comment and a rating. Here are some of our responses:

Awesome! Thanks (10), Excellente! (9.9), Very Tasty (10), Very good (9), The Best Cookies ever (10), 12:30pm..this is the fourth! (9), Nice tookes, not too sweet, but too tasty (9), Yum yum ummm (10), very good (10.1), tasty (9), I loved them (10), Bravo (2 to the 10th power....anyone figure out that Awesome Sauce is an engineer?)

Overall, these cookies were a success!!!


Rating:
The Clumsy Gourmet: 8.5
Awesome Sauce: 8.5
Junky Monkey: 9.5