Cookbook challenge, week 10, day 6 - Get It Ripe

Yesterday, Mike came home from work and almost immediately asked me to make him some shortbread. My last attempt at shortbread was a bit of a failure. I tried to make millionaire shortbread, which has a layer of caramel, then a layer of chocolate, topping the shortbread layer. My shortbread was really crumbly, and I burned my caramel, which ended up tasting more like burnt toffee. It was kinda sad, yet still delicious. But this time, Mike just wanted straight-up shortbread - no frills.

So, as promised, I made the Shortbread Cookies from Get It Ripe.


I subbed margarine for coconut oil because I didn't have the patience to liquidize, measure, refrigerate, and then dice my coconut oil. I also threw some chocolate chips into half the batch. The flavour and texture of the shortbread is really nice.

I had a couple of problems with this recipe. First of all, the directions tell you to use a food processor, but my food processor is really only an attachment to my immersion blender, and it wasn't big enough to fit all the ingredients. So I bunged everything in a bowl and used the dough hooks on my hand mixer. The directions then tell you to turn out the mixture onto a clean surface and knead into a ball. The dough was so sticky that it stuck to the countertop. Once I got around to the rolling stage, it stuck to the rolling pin and the countertop, and it didn't want to come off the counter after I'd cut the cookies. I ended up having to roll and press each one by hand, which was annoying because I really wanted to use my forest animal cookie cutters.

Because I have a small oven and only one cookie sheet (right now), I had to do these in batches. I ended up making the first batch far too big, as you can see from the picture, but I still had to do 3 batches, so these took a really long time. I really don't know if I'd make these again, given all the problems I had and the time it took, even though they are really tasty.

I've finally uploaded pictures from the last couple of days, so I'll go back and add those to previous posts.