Shortbread Cookies

Shortbread Cookies:

• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter
• ½ cup sugar
• 1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
• 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. In a medium bowl, cream butter, sugar, and vanilla until light and fluffy.
3. Add flour, baking powder, and salt and mix until just combined. When you get big chunks of dough, dump them onto your counter and work together by hand.
4. Roll out dough on floured surface until it’s about a ¼ inch thick. Cut out your cookies into desired shapes and place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. These don’t spread much, so you can place them about ½ inch apart.
5. Bake for 10-13 minutes, taking the cookies out before they start to brown at the edges.
6. Yield: 36 small cookies

These are (no exaggeration) perfect as they are, but they’re delicious with lemon glaze too!

Lemon Glaze:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 tbsp water
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp lemon zest

1. Place all ingredients in a small bowl and stir until smooth. You may want to add a little more or less water to get the glaze to your preferred consistency.
2. Dip the top of each cookie in glaze and place on a cookie sheet to dry.

If you’ve checked out the recording on my about page, you know about the different phases of life I went through before pastry school. This recipe was developed during my “unemployment phase”.

When you drop out of grad school with no plan and no job prospects, there’s not much left to do but bake cookies!

You may be asking yourself, “Hey Riley, if you were passing time in your kitchen while unemployed, why didn’t you go to pastry school then? Why did you become a copywriter?”

Excellent question.

I suppose I needed to spend 6 months writing copy (I’d love to be more specific, but I still don’t really understand what I did at that job, so here we are) to know that what I really wanted to do was spend my days surrounded by butter and sugar. I don’t think it surprised any of my coworkers when I left my job for pastry school, because I was more well-known at the office for my cookies than my copy (and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way).

And after all that, here I am, in another unemployment phase. The lesson here, if you chose to see it, is that life is unpredictable, but cookies will always be there for you 😉

I used these shortbread cookies to make “fossils” for my nephew’s birthday cake!