Lemony Shortbread: The Childhood Cookie I Improved with Sourdough & Protein + 3 Easy Toppings

I'm going to make my favorite childhood cut-out cookies but better. And how? By adding protein and sourdough. And I'll show you how to make these three super easy and beautiful icings to decorate your cookies. And one of these tastes like sour candy. As always you'll find a link to the full recipe and the ingredients in the notes. Now you want to start by zesting your lemon and then rubbing it into your sugar until you have a super fragrant kind of lemon and sugar mix that gives your cookies the perfect lemony flavor. The ingredients are ideally room temperature. I'm using my stand mixer from this point and we'll add the sugar and just cream it with the butter until incorporated. As opposed to sugar cookies you just want to whip it until cream and not fluffy so the cookies which will inhibit the gluten formation. Then the protein powder which gives protein obviously but also balances the water that you would usually not find in a shortbread cookie which is from the sourdough discard. Speaking of which the sourdough discard has the ability to make the protein easier bioavailable when fermented which is why I love using it in my recipes. Now I've added the sourdough discard, vanilla and all the mixed together dry ingredients to the butter sugar mix and just kneaded them until I had ever so slightly crumbly dough. Now because this is shortbread I want to handle this as little as possible so I just pat it together with my hands on cling film so I can put it in the fridge easily. In this case I rolled it out between two layers of cling film to make it very very easy and very non-sticky and you have two options now. You can either go for the walker's kind of style which is what I'm doing here. Roll it into a rectangular shape and just slice it later or you can go for the roll-out cookies which are slightly thinner and larger and both options will then go into the fridge for a few hours or up to three days to be ready and really cold when you want to cut them out. Now once the dough is cold you can cut out the cookies as I did here. I used walker's biscuit to get the right shape and size and then I pricked them with a fork to get the classic pattern or you can use cookie cutters to get any shape or size you would like and whichever shape you're using bake them at 350 Fahrenheit 175 degrees Celsius for about 10 to 12 minutes until they're really light golden brown at the edges and have a really nice crystal white and as promised for decoration you have three options. You can use a simple lemon icing sugar mix that I use here for the walker's kind of cookies and then decorate with a tiny bit of lemon zest and they will be absolutely easy delicious and perfect for any tea time or you can do royal icing and dry your hand and decorating which I'm failing miserably at or use this marble trick I found which is absolutely stunning so you use royal icing put a few drops food color in it swirl it and then comes the really fun part you start dipping your cookies into it and they come out in the most beautiful colors and shapes that you can imagine and every single one of them will be unique. Now the last option is a bit of a wild card I have to admit but a really fun one so I used rainbow colors in the same way as I used the marble icing and then I made a mix out of sugar and citric acid which is what is used on sour patch candies and so I dipped the cookies into the rainbow color and then right away into the sugar having them coated with this kind of sparkly and sour topping and this might be controversial but I really love these. So those are my three options you find all the details in the link with the blog post and recipe and with lots of information and if you like this video I would love it if you would subscribe and give it a like it helps me a lot