Or at least, this time i have.
Ben once told me his recipe for shortbread: equal parts butter, sugar and flour. So i grabbed a stick of butter, squished it into a measuring cup: 2/3rds of a cup. Gotcha. Got the flour and sugar out of the freezer, measured all the appropriate amounts into a mixing bowl, and went to down. Added some cinnamon and clove while i was at it, because YUM.
I couldn’t find a baking pan; apparently they’re all on vacation, or Ben keeps them in a secret cupboard. So i figured i’d roll it out into cookies, which i did.
Once they were baking, i decided to make a large batch of my pad thai sauce. That went off without a hitch, and i now have a half-filled jar (the size of a big jar of pasta sauce, which is what it used to contain) of it hanging out in my fridge. I can have my ghetto ramen pad thai anytime my little hormones desire it. Which they do. Often. And frequently.
That done, i checked back in on the shortbr… the hell? All of the cookies had merged into one large glomp of bubbling stuff. Oh dear.
Um. What to do, what to do… i found a muffin tin and scooped the stuff into three of the muffin cups. Put it back in the oven, where it merely sat and bubbled malevolently at me. In retrospect, i’m wondering if i actually measured everything correctly. I mean, did i think i used 2/3rds of a cup of flour… but did i really? Damn my brain fog.
I think next time, i will make Ben hang out in the kitchen with me when i make it; that way, if it just refuses to work out, i’ll know if it’s something i did wrong this time, or if shortbread just hates me.
Actually, if you used one stick of butter, that’s only 1/2 cup, not 2/3 (my tollhouse cookie recipe calls for one cup of butter and that’s 2 sticks), so with 2/3 c of sugar and 2/3 c of flour, it should have been right, unless the butter was too soft when you mixed in the sugar and flour.
I’ve noticed that my cookies turn out a lot softer in the middle if the butter is too soft when I mix in the sugar with it. I can’t use it directly out of the refrigerator, but if it sets out too long, it’s too soft. The butter needs to be firm enough that when you open the wrapper, you can get the butter off the wrapper without having to scrape any off (at least that’s when my cookies have turned out the best).
Yeah, Vesta, i think the butter being too soft was the likely problem with this mess. I know that when i’m making pie crusts, the butter has to be almost solid when i mix it, and then refrigerated for a while before i roll it out. I wonder if refrigerating the dough before baking it would have saved it, in this case.