Scotch Shortbread

From Joy of Cooking:

Preheat oven to 325.

Cream 1 cup of butter

Sift together:
2 C sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 C confectioners' sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt

Blend dry ingredients into the butter. Pat the stiff dough into an ungreased 9 x 9 inch pan and press edges down. Pierce with a fork through the dough every half-inch. Bake 25 to 30 minutes. Cut into squares while warm.

RESULTS: Seems simple, right? Well maybe it is and I was just too cavalier about it.

First of all, confectioner's sugar has to be the hardest thing to sift. It picks up this crazy static charge as it goes through the metal mesh, and it seems to want to stick to everything outside of my plastic measuring cup, including my fuzzy sous chef, but nothing inside of it.

Second, I had a bright idea for softening the butter, which was straight from the freezer. Since the first step is creaming the butter in the mixing bowl, I though, why not put the metal mixing bowl in the oven as it's warming up, thus saving me the extra dishes that I would need for using the microwave. This was stupid for more than one reason. Unlike a microwave, an oven heats things from the outside in, which I knew but didn't recall until I pulled the mixing bowl out (which was very hot, so I had to be careful) and the core of the butter was still frozen, but it was swimming in a lake of hot melted butter. I didn't want all the butter to be melted because you can't cream melted butter, so I thought, why not try creaming it now, and maybe between the frozen butter and the melted butter, the temperature will even out and it'll cream nicely. This still might not have been disastrous, I don't know, but in an earlier attempt to have fewer dishes, I hadn't cut the butter up into pieces. It was still just two sticks, which, when I turned the mixer on medium, shot out of the mixer and bounced around my kitchen at high speed, leaving greasy butter trails over everything. Harper's been cleaning the floor for a while, and just took herself back to bed to rest up for Round Two. As this butter experiment seemed to create more cleaning for me, not less, I'm going to stick with microwave defrosting in the future.

The recipe said it should be a stiff dough. Maybe it should be, but mine was more like a crumbly pie dough. I DID think I was being smart by reducing the butter by a tablespoon and a half (purely arbitrary, since I had a partially used stick of butter already opened). I know you're not supposed to mess with amounts when you're baking, but like I said, I was being cavalier (read: stupid). The finished product was really more like the bottom crust on lemon squares than a good, solid shortbread. I think I'll follow the recipe next time. :)