Shortnin' Bread Redux

I don’t know why I didn’t realize when I was typing the recipe up, that the shortnin’ bread recipe in the Lincoln Heritage Trail Cookbook, by Marian French, 1971, was a shortbread recipe. Have I really been so dense my whole life, wondering what shortnin’ bread was and never equating it to my favorite kind of cookie? *Whacks self in head so hard birds twitter around it* I didn’t make the connection until I was actually making it.

Here’s my favorite regular shortbread recipe, my own combination of several others for the ratio of sweetness to crispness that I like best.

Scottish Shortbread

2 ½ sticks of butter (for best results, use European style)

¾ cup powdered sugar

2 ½ cups flour (for best results, use pastry flour)

½ t vanilla (optional)

Mix, press into two 9” round pans, score, cook at 325 for 30 minutes. Let cool ten minutes, turn out of pan, cut. Alternatively, can be spread thin on a cookie sheet to bake.

To add insult to injury in my not recognizing shortnin’ bread as shortbread, here’s a favorite brown sugar shortbread recipe given to me by a friend and coworker over a decade ago. These are scrumptious, hence too dangerous to my diet to make outside of the holidays.

Brown Sugar Shortbread

Cookie:

1 cup butter

¾ cup light brown sugar

2 t vanilla

2 cups flour

Topping:

1 T butter

1 c chocolate chips

1 cup chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugar, and vanilla, beat, then flour. Shape into 1 inch balls, then form into logs. Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 17 minutes at 325. Cool.

Dip one end of the logs in the chocolate and butter which have been melted together, then dip into chopped pecans. Refrigerate until set.

This is the Lincoln recipe again. I don’t keep brown sugar around. It just gets hard. All brown sugar is, is white sugar that has been sprayed with the molasses removed in processing. So that’s what I do, just add a healthy blob of molasses when I add white sugar. It’s rich in minerals. In making this Lincoln version, I also replaced a third of the flour with whole wheat pastry flour. It was fabulous. And quickly gone.

Shortnin’ Bread

1 stick butter

¼ cup brown sugar

1 ½ cup flour

Mix butter with sugar. Add flour and mix well. Roll about ½ inch thick on a floured board and shape with a biscuit cutter. Bake on lightly greased and floured pan at 350 for about 20 minutes.

I doubled the next batch and tried replacing 3 T of butter with 9 T of ground toasted flax seed, but it was too crumbly, so I ended up adding the butter back in. I replaced a third of the white flour with wheat pastry flour again, and tossed in a handful of wheat germ on top of it. No rolling this out, I had to mold it into shape like wet sand, but the end result is quite tasty, kind of like a Hob Nob. (I would increase the wheat germ and decrease the flax next time, to create a better texture.) Healthy short bread? Who would have guessed?