-Back to Basics_ Valentines Marbled Shortbread _ Georgia's Cakes.

Hey guys welcome back to my channel, as you can see I'm not in my normal setting because we've all gone back into lockdown I thought I'd bring back my back to basic recipes for you. So here are a few really simple and easy recipes to follow using basic equipment and ingredients and I hope you enjoy them. So the beauty about shortbread is only a few ingredients are required. It's extremely versatile, I'm flavouring mine with lemon today but by all means keep it vanilla, you can replace some flour with cocoa powder to make it chocolatey, grate some orange zest in there or even incorporate dried fruits such as raisins and cranberries but I thought I'd start with more of a basic version. So in my bowl I've got some plain flour and as I said I'm going to flavour mine with lemon, so I'm just going to zest a lemon inside. I love using lemon because when it comes to decorating shortbread I'm going to use royal icing and I'm going to use some lemon juice to thin that out so it's nice to match what goes on top with what's inside the actual biscuit too. I'm then going to add my sugar and the other reason why I like this recipe is that it doesn't have that much sugar in and the biscuit itself isn't that sweet and some butter and finally a small drop of vanilla and I'm going to go in with my hands and scrunch all the ingredients together. Now what I'm actually doing is rubbing the dry ingredients into the butter so I'm not only mixing the ingredients I'm actually breaking up the butter too. This can take about five minutes and of course you can do this on a stand mixer with a paddle attachment. What will happen is that the butter will break down and the mixture will become a sort of sand like consistency. If you continue mixing the ingredients start to bind together a little bit more and eventually a dough is formed. I like to gather as much up as I can in the bowl before tipping it out onto the surface where I'm going to knead it a little bit until it's smooth. I'm not kneading it to develop gluten or anything like I would with bread, it's just to make sure all the butter is completely incorporated and now it's time to roll out. So I've got a baking tray with some baking paper ready and I'm going to cut my biscuits into a couple of shapes and I've got a round cutter and a heart cutter because it's of course nearly Valentine's Day so why not? I'm going to dust my surface with a little bit of flour and also dust the top of the dough so my rolling pin doesn't stick to it and then like rolling anything out I'm going to go backwards and forwards a little bit keeping the pressure of my hands even at either end of the rolling pin and then rotate the dough every three or four rolls and that is how you roll out the dough evenly. You want your shortbread about half a centimetre thick, if it's too thin it can catch in the oven. So I'm going to start off with my circular cutter. If you've seen my other back to basic videos you've seen that I've used all sorts of things to cut shapes out, whether it's a lid of a jar or the top of a glass but I've actually found some cutters this time. It does make life a little bit easier and I've also got my heart. Now you can see how cleanly the dough cuts, it's a really soft smooth dough and I absolutely love working with it. So of course when you're cutting shapes out you want to cut them as close to each other as possible to minimise the dough wastage however with this dough you can scrunch it up and roll it out again. The only thing to look out for is how dry the dough gets because you're sprinkling flour onto the dough and the surface you are incorporating more flour so if you roll the dough out again and again it may get a little bit dry. So I like to re-roll it out maximum three times in order to maintain the softness of the dough. Before baking I like to chill the biscuits in the fridge because I think it helps maintain their shapes when they cook. So I'm going to put the tray in the fridge for about 15 minutes while I preheat my oven to 170 degrees celsius and then bake the biscuits for 10 to 12 minutes until they just start turning golden brown. So with shortbread you want to keep them quite pale. I actually left this tray in a little bit too long and you can see that on one end they're starting to brown slightly. They're not burnt so they're still delicious and okay to use. This tray came out a lot better. You can see that the biscuits are really pale but I can feel that they've set. You don't want to touch the biscuits until they're completely cool otherwise they'll break. So I'm going to leave them on the tray until they're completely cool and then transfer them onto a cooling rack to get ready for decorating. So shortbread biscuits are absolutely delicious plain however if you want to add a pop of colour to them it's really easy to do so. I'm going to make some royal icing so in this bowl I have some powdered sugar and I'm going to add an egg white. Usually I do this in a mixer with a whisk attachment, it's a lot faster but because I don't have one here I'm going to use a fork and mix it until I can't see any powdered sugar anymore and it's formed a thick paste. Then I'm going to get a lemon and use the juice to thin the royal icing out. Now it's not an exact quantity it's all about the consistency of the royal icing and what you want to do with it as well. So if you wanted to pipe some detailed decoration on the biscuits you want it at a thicker consistency but I'm actually going to dip the biscuits in marbled royal icing and therefore I want it a little bit looser. So I want the royal icing to get to quite a runny consistency but still being thick so it doesn't completely run off the biscuits. I actually saw a great trick online that shows that if you draw a number 8 in the icing it should take 8 seconds for it to disappear so let's call it the number 8 trick and it looks like it's working so I think we're there. Because I want marble icing I'm going to transfer a couple of tablespoons into two separate bowls and colour one of them pink and one of them purple. I'm going to go quite heavy with the colouring which I don't usually do but I really want the marbled colours to stand out. I'm then going to go in with small amounts of each colour in random splodges back into the white icing and then use a toothpick to create this marbling effect. And now the biscuits are ready to dip. So I'm going to leave my circle biscuits plain and dip the hearts to get some lovely marbled valentine's day hearts. So I'm going to dip the biscuit in, press it down so I feel like it's got a good covering of icing and then as I lift it up I'm going to kind of do a twisting action to make sure the icing goes back onto the surface and look at that pattern, isn't that just gorgeous? So I'm going to go in with more biscuits and then every now and then I'm going to re-marble the icing just swirling around the toothpick again because it keeps the pattern fresh. It's also best to do this when the biscuits are still on the baking tray because the icing might run off and if you want you can also put some baking paper underneath to protect the surface. So if your icing is on the slightly runny side you can just go over the side of each biscuit just with your finger wiping away that dripping excess. I need to do it on a couple of mine and you can leave them like this but I'm going to go a little bit extra and top mine off with a few dried rose petals that I have. I also think this adds to the valentine's day theme quite well too. If you wanted to at this stage you can also apply sprinkles but I think rose petals are a bit nicer to eat than sprinkles are. So shortbread's ready to eat as soon as it's cooled down but if you have iced them with royal icing you do need to leave it for a few hours for it to set completely. But there you have it, that is how I make my shortbread biscuits. Like I said they are so delicious left plain, another trick is to sprinkle sugar as they come out the oven if you do want that extra sweetness. Go ahead and flavour them however you like, they're such a soft buttery biscuit and so versatile. I can't wait to see your creations, please tag me at georgiascakes if you do try them out and see you soon for more tutorials.