I Didn't Know Shortbread Was Supposed to Be Difficult

I attempted shortbread for the first time this weekend. I have my grandmother's old recipe, which is very similar to the recipe in Jael McHenry's The Kitchen Daughter. And given that she said you could put the dough together in the food processor, I thought it would be a quick and easy set of cookies to bake (that wouldn't be affected by our stupid altitude issues).

What I wasn't counting on was discovering that our ovens are both a POS. Yes, surprise, surprise. The ovens in the house that we're renting are about a thousand years old and now bake unevenly. Which means that in addition to all the issues I have trying to bake at high altitude (flat cookies), I now have to account for the fact that anything on the back of the pan will be cooking at a higher temp than the front.

But, I didn't discover that until after I fought with the first batch. See, what my recipes don't tell you and what this recipe does tell you, is that you need to chill your dough. You're working with COLD butter. As the warmth of your hands and the working over of the dough heats up that butter, the dough becomes more sticky and hard to work with.

So, chill your dough. Other than that, a test throwaway batch to see how your oven is working might be a given. My grandmother's recipe actually says bake 40-45 minutes at 275. Yikes! I found that the 25 minutes at 350 from the other recipe was still too long in my oven. About 15 minutes at 350 yielded half a batch of ok cookies (because the back ones burned). And 15 minutes at 325 gave me a chance to remove some pretty back cookies and set the front ones back in for 2 more minutes.

Agh. Baking is really not supposed to be this difficult!