Tea, Food and Recipes.

While I was experimenting with variations of shortbread I started thinking about the different diets out there, in particular Ketogenic and Gluten free diets. I was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a basic ketogenic and gluten free shortbread type cookie to create variations with?” This is when the search for the perfect ketogentic and gluten free shortbread recipe started. Nothing extraordinary came from this search, unfortunately. The two recipes I finally tried, are below along with my comments.

The 12 days of shortbread have come and gone and we have tried them and all and gained an appropriate amount of weight in the process but while it was worth every pound of butter, thankfully it’s over. Not quite. While experimenting with different shortbread variations some variations were tried and either were amazing but just too late to make it to the top 12 or just weren’t as good as any of the other 12. Whatever the reason, they were still made and sampled with just as much as love and care as the other and contained just as many calories as any of the top 12, so deserve an honourable mention.

S’mores are a great cookie sandwich in the summer or in the winter. Reminds you of camp fires or summer bbqs or warm toasty marshmallows by a fireplace. Either way, s’mores are all year and all season. All the ingredients of a s’more are mixed right into the classic shortbread dough then baked into these great, unique looking masses of shortbread cookie. Each bite is a bit of summer, bbq and sitting by a fireplace. Can’t get much better than that in a cookie.

Chocolate and orange go together wonderfully as we all know from Terry’s Orange Chocolate. Those Orange Chocolates were a Christmas staple in my house and I wanted to try and get that feel and taste in the shortbread.

Another savory variation of the classic shortbread. This one was again inspired from my search of savory cookies and biscuits on Pinterest. Adding in herbs into a cookie dough is a nice way to get some additional flavour. Cheeses are also a great way to add in a complimentary flavour to the sweet that is in a traditional cookie or shortbread. The Parmesan does seem to dry out the dough a little making it a bit tough to roll out the 1 inch balls but once the cookie is baked, with the heat melting the Parmesan, everything eventually sticks together nicely.

Shortbread is usually associated with the Christmas holiday season. And so are candy canes. Put them both together and what do you get? Christmas-y yumminess! ( I have no idea if Christmas-y or yumminess are the best words for SEO but whether they rank high on Google’s keywords or not, they are the best words to describe this shortbread variation!) This was another variation suggested by my fellow kitchen experimenter. The crunchy and minty taste of the candy canes compliments the smooth, creamy, buttery sweetness of the classic shortbread.