Shortbread, in my mind, has always been associated with dry cookies that come in tins and ten sticks of butter. So I apprehensively approached this recipe, fearing that it would come out too rich for my and others liking. The pictures on the recipe page reassured me that they would be more like a peach bar with crumble rather than a dense, dry shortbread. And the ingredients and instructions made it seem simple enough to whip up two hours before a party.
Smitten Kitchen is one of my favorite blogs for dessert inspirations. I like to read the recipe notes and reader comments, but rarely do I follow recipes exactly. For this peach shortbread recipe, I tweaked the amount of several ingredients and changed some instructions in order to work with what I have.
The following is what I used for baking in an 8x8 glass pan:
(most amounts stayed the same as the original, but I used less flour, butter, and slightly less sugar)
3/4 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
a dash of salt (since I'm using salted butter)
1 stick + 2 tablespoons of cold salted butter
1 egg
1 pitted and thinly sliced peach
Smitten Kitchen's recipe called for browning the butter, which I started to do but without 30 minutes of freezing time to spare, I took the separated butter mixture out of the freezer after only about 5 minutes and moved on with the recipe.
I tiled two layers of peach slices instead of just one. So I packed on 2/3 of the mixture, by pressing with a rubber spatula, and laid one layer of peach, then sprinkled half of the remaining mixture, followed by another peach layer in a different layout design, and topped everything off with the rest of the mixture. (see picture below)
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