ad hoc at home #6: shortbread cookies

Pure joy can be created from 4 simple ingredients: butter, sugar, vanilla and flour.

Who knew?

If you've ever eaten at French Laundry, you've walked away with some of those light golden buttery crumbly cookies cut into perfect little rectangles. Well, with a stand mixer and some parchment paper, it's easier than pie to make (I know the saying is easy as pie, but pie is not this easy to make).

The ingredients: 1.75 sticks (or 14 tbs) unsalted butter; 0.5 cup granulated sugar + extra to sprinkle over cookies; 1 tsp vanilla paste or extract; 2 cups AP flour.

The dough: Using the paddle mixer, mix butter and sugar on low to combine, and then beat at medium speed for ~3 minutes until creamy. Add vanilla, and then on add flour on lowest speed. Once all the flour is in, beat on medium until dough begins to cling to the paddle and no longer looks dry, but before it forms a solid mass. Transfer dough to a board and bring it together with your hands. Form the dough into a roughly rectangle shape, wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes, and up to several days.

Forming the cookie: Roll the refrigerated dough between two pieces of parchment paper until it's 0.25-inches thin. Set aside the top parchment, and cut the dough into 2-inch squares. Cover again with the top parchment and refrigerate again for ~15 minutes until cookies are firm enough to remove from the parchment.

Baking: Position oven racks in lower and upper thirds of the oven, and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove top sheet of parchment, and arrange cookies 1-inch apart on two cookie sheets lined with parchment paper or Silpats. Sprinkle cookies with sugar, and bake for 11-12 minutes, until their edges are just starting to turn golden brown. Allow cookies to cool a few minutes on the baking sheet before transferring onto a rack to cool completely.
After making the cookies a few times, I decided to take the cookie one step farther: dipped in chocolate.

Technically, to create a shiny, hard chocolate coating for the cookies, you have to "temper" it. Well, tempering technically requires bringing chocolate to a certain temperature, then cooling to a certain temperature, etc., and I don't cook with thermometers, not yet anyway. So I looked for shortcuts, and this is what I came up with:

For a single batch of cookies, you just need 5-6 ounces of good quality semisweet chocolate (you can use bittersweet chocolate, too, but for me, it wasn't sweet enough to stand up to the cookie's flavor). I chopped the chocolate into large pieces, and transferred approximately 2/3 of it to a medium-sized glass bowl. The glass bowl went over a small pot of simmering water. I added a teaspoon of shortening (I read somewhere that shortening added to melting chocolate stabilizes the end product and lends a sheen, although I haven't yet tested what happens if you don't add it), and stirred the chocolate around slowly until melted. I then added the rest of the chocolate, which I think achieves the cooling part of the tempering process, and continued stirring until it was all melted.

Then I removed the bowl of chocolate, and started dipping. I placed the dipped cookies on parchment paper to cool.

This yields enough melted chocolate to allow easy dipping in a bowl, but this means you have plenty to spare. You could theoretically use even less chocolate, but then the chocolate coats the bowl and will be quite shallow making it difficult to dip the cookie.

Allow the chocolate dipped cookies to cool in the refrigerator until the chocolate hardens, which I found takes at least 45 minutes.

Needless to say, these chocolate-dipped versions were very well received.