It's a joke in my family that I am really Scottish. Well, I was born in Glasgow and I lived there for all of 3 weeks before my family moved to Cumbria. Even so, I class myself as Scottish and that was fed by visiting my Nana across the border where we enjoyed many Scottish traditions, like celebrating Burns Night with haggis, having a grand knee up for Hogmanay with a dram or two of whisky, or getting knackered at a ceilidh.
Side note - the BEST place to get your haggis for Burn’s Night is from Gretna’s J Kerr & Sons. I haven’t yet found a haggis that compares to it. Not an ad ;)
One of the most quintessential Scottish treats is Shortbread. Back in the 16th Century, Mary Queen of Scots came to power. She is credited with developing shortbread to the tasty biscuit we know today. Previously it was a twice-baked bread biscuit that was made from using leftover bread dough. But Mary could see that the shortbread recipe could be improved. Having some influence from her time in France, she swapped the yeast for butter and the shortbread was transformed into a sweeter and more crumbly biscuit. The main three ingredients are flour, sugar and butter. But back in the 16th Century, these were often expensive and hard to find, so outside of the royal court shortbread was reserved for special occasions like weddings, Christmas and Hogmanay.
I see no reason why a post-dip treat can’t be treated like a special occasion. So I set to, to make my first batch of shortbread using my Nana’s recipe. Sadly I never had the opportunity to make it with her, so I grabbed the chance of getting my mum to show me how her mum made her classic shortbread.
The goal was to have it with the strawberries from my garden, coupled with a good helping of clotted cream. Who needs Wimbledon when you have the North Lakes and homegrown strawberries and shortbread?
Ingredients to make 8 shortbread petticoats:
680g Plain flour
230g Ground Rice Flour
450g Butter (unsalted)
230g Caster Sugar
Pinch of Salt
Method:
- Measure out your ingredients and pop the oven on at 110 degrees.
- Put the sugar and room-temperature butter in a bowl and cream together. For me, this meant getting a wooden spoon and giving it some elbow grease as my Mum wanted to give me the traditional making experience. For those of us living in the 21st Century, by all means, use a whisking machine. But I gotta say, doing it with a wooden spoon gives you a higher sense of achievement when people say at the end “Oooooh lovely, you made this?” Yes. Yes, I did!
- Once you have your butter and sugar nicely blended it should look white and smooth in texture. Make sure there are no butter lumps. Now slowly add in your flour - don't forget to add your pinch of salt! You will probably look at it like I did and say “All that flour won't mix in” but trust me, it does. Near the end, abandon the spoon and finish kneading the flour into the creamed butter and sugar with your hands. Again, this adds to the “Yes I made it” feeling of accomplishment later.
- Roll into a ball and use a knife to cut into 8 even pieces. These will make your petticoats. (In the video we used half the mixture and made 4 petticoats)
- Flour your workstation and get your rolling pin out. Pick up one of your dough pieces, roll it into a ball and then evenly roll it out into a circle. The trick here is that you want to make every petticoat the same thickness so you can cook them evenly.
- Decorate your petticoats however you would like. Make sure to prick all over the shortbread with a fork. This is because the mixture has a lot of butter in and we need it to cook so that you can enjoy your light crumbly shortbread by the water's edge!
- As my Mum says, this is the tricksy part! When we cooked ours, we were working with my Mum’s new oven (the manual for it is like War and Peace!) so she is still getting used to it. If you are confident with your oven, start off cooking for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes take out the shortbread to see how it’s doing. The trick is to cook it without burning it. You are looking for a firm and yet anaemic-looking treat. If you feel it needs to go back in, put it in for another 15 minutes and then check it again. We ended up cooking for an hour. But it all depends on your oven, eye and how firm the shortbread feels when you take it out.
- Once cooked, let it cool down.
- Whilst it's cooling down, check out the website to see where your next dipping location might be and then head to the shop to get your clotted cream. Then off to your garden to pick some fresh strawberries. For ease of shoreline serving, I chopped up my strawberries and mixed them into the clotted cream so it all stayed put when I plopped some on top of my shortbread. Damn tasty! If I do say so myself!
If you enjoyed that, then check out my mums Tiffin recipe for more biscuity loveliness!
