Recipe | Lemon shortbread

Just 4 ingredients make this delicious, melt-in-the-mouth lemon shortbread

The original recipe I used for this bake was for lemon and ginger shortbread. I’m not the greatest fan of ginger, so just left that ingredient out. I also don’t have the tin the original recipe recommends for this bake (more on that below), but my alternative tin certainly didn’t impact the flavour of the shortbread 🙂

Ingredients (makes 12 slices of shortbread)

100 g / 3.5 oz butter, plus a little more for greasing your tin
50 g / 1.5 oz caster sugar, plus a little extra for dusting
Zest of 1 large lemon
175 g / 6 oz plain flour

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 150 degrees C (or 130 if you have a fan oven)/ Gas Mark 2/ 300 degrees F. Grease and line a circular baking tin. The original recipe recommends using a 22-cm loose-bottomed fluted tart tin. I don’t happen to have one of those, so I used my 22.5-cm/9-inch circular springform tin. Apart from not giving the shortbread nicely crinkled edges, it did a fine job. And if you don’t have a loose-bottomed/springform tin, I wouldn’t worry. If you line your round tin properly, you should be able to run a knife around the edge of your baked shortbread and lift it out of the baking tin.

Beat the butter until soft. If you have an electric mixer, I’d let it do the hard work. Once soft, add the sugar and the grated lemon zest. Stir to combine. You really do need to use all the zest from a large lemon. Even using all the zest you can see in the picture below, the resulting lemon flavour was subtle.

Stir in the flour. I let the mixer do an initial stir to get something on the verge of resembling a dough.

Then I took the bowl off the mixing stand and finished the mixing using my hands to bring the dough together.

Flatten the dough into your tin until you have a smooth, even layer. Prick the top of the dough with a fork several times (I may have gone a bit far… but I liked the pattern!).

Bake for 40 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 5 minutes before turning out of your tin (careful not to burn yourself). Turn onto a cutting board and slice into wedges.