Alison Roman

First recipe using the new stand mixer!!! I've always heard that proper shortbread requires rigorous creaming of butter and sugar, so this was the perfect maiden voyage for the kitchen aid.

I used the basic shortbread recipe from Alison's book, Sweet Enough. I splurged on Kerrygold butter since (a) butter is basically all that shortbread has going on, and (b) this was a momentous celebration of the kitchen aid's arrival. The cookies came out great! They have a lovely, buttery mouthfeel. I especially like their salt distribution, which comes from the salted butter in the dough as well as flaky sea salt on top. My only note about the recipe is that the cookies took 16 minutes to bake, which was a hair longer than instructed. This is not the first time a baked good has taken longer than the recipe says, so this might be a problem with my oven more than anything else.

Now that I'm equipped with a kitchen aid, this is only the beginning of my shortbread adventures. I may try Smitten Kitchen's recipe as a point of comparison, and will certainly experiment with flavored shortbreads soon. Lemon shortbread and chocolate chunk shortbread, I'm looking at you both.