Chocolate chip shortbread recipe

This recipe makes some really nice crumbly shortbread.  I developed this recipe from a basic shortbread “3-2-1” recipe, so-called because it’s 3 parts flour, 2 parts butter and 1 part sugar.  I tweaked this recipe gradually to my personal preference.  I’ve since developed quite a few variants, but this recipe is the classic one that all of my colleagues and family enjoy.  I hope you do too.

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Ingredients

• 125g caster sugar
• 250g block butter (not spreadable)
• 375g plain flour
• 200g plain chocolate chips (optional)
• half a teaspoon of salt

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Method

1. Take the butter out of the fridge a couple of hours in advance and allow to warm to room temperature.
2. Put the sugar, flour and salt into a large bowl and mix them together.
3. Add the block butter to the bowl and massage the butter into the mixture, this will gradually make bits that look like breadcrumbs.
4. Once you’ve massaged all of the butter into the mixture, combine it into a dough and knead until it’s soft and smooth.
5. Add the chocolate chips (these are optional, but really tasty!).
6. Roll the dough into small even sized balls and place onto a baking tray.  I usually split one batch into 25 balls.  You don’t need to grease the baking tray, the butter will do a good enough job of stopping the biscuits from sticking to the tray.
7. Place the tray into the center of a pre heated oven on gas mark 4 (155 degrees celsius on an oven thermometer) for 30 minutes or until the dough turns a golden colour.
8. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack (if you leave them on the baking tray to cool completely they will stick to the baking tray).
9. After the biscuits have cooled, transfer them to a biscuit tin.  Don’t leave them out on the rack for too long or they will start to dry out and go stale.
10. Make a cuppa and enjoy your biscuits!

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Tips and lessons that I’ve learned

I’ve been making shortbread for quite a few years.  Mistakes were made and lessons have been learned.  I made these mistakes for you, dear reader, so you don’t have to repeat my folly 😉

• Try not to overcook the shortbread.  We don’t need a very high heat in the oven.  Don’t think of it as trying to cook the dough, think of it more like we’re trying to dry it out a bit.  We want to leave the biscuits with a nice crumbly texture, we don’t want to leave them too hard.
• The choice of butter is very important.  I’ve tried as many different types of butter for this recipe as I could find.  My current favourite butter is Anchor butter, but don’t use the unsalted one, it’s not as tasty.  Look for a rich, salty butter.  The saltier the better!
• Don’t use spreadable butter.  Spreadable butter has the wrong consistency for this recipe, so your dough will end up quite sloppy.  Spreadable is also not pure butter, it’s a mixture of vegetable fat and butter.  This means that it doesn’t taste as buttery as regular butter.  Trust me, you’ll get a much better flavour by using block butter.
• Dark chocolate is better for this recipe than milk chocolate.  Feel free to try milk chocolate chips, but I found that they weren’t chocolatey enough.  They seemed to get drowned out by the flavour of the shortbread.
• Baking temperature is very important.  All ovens are different, two ovens on the same setting can differ in temperature by quite a large margin.  It’s best to use an oven thermometer for better accuracy.

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I hope you like the recipe and enjoy the shortbread.  Please leave any questions or feedback for me in the comments.  I’d love to hear about how you get along with the recipe. 🙂