I love old recipe books and books on food, and although I don’t actively go out of my way to look for them, if I see one floating around homeless then I generally want to add it to my straining shelf. Wandering past a charity shop the other day, I saw the Good Housekeeping Home Baking book from the year that I was born sitting in a forlorn heap in the window, and I had no choice but to hand over my 50 cents and take it home with me.

Of course, once I’d got it home, it didn’t take long at all for the temptation to try one of these retro recipes to get the better of me. I don’t bake as much as I’d like to and don’t have a wide range of baking ingredients on hand in my kitchen right at this moment, so I had a flick through to find something fast, easy and containing only things that I already had in the cupboard.

Shortbread

Everyone loves shortbread, including me. In my case it might well be because I just love butter, I can eat it on its own, which other people regularly tell me is weird. So, I love shortbread because they are a good excuse to eat huge amounts of butter and not much else and not be told that I’m a freak.

The recipe that I normally use is completely different from the Good Housekeeping method. For one thing, my usual recipe contains semolina, and for another the proportion of butter to flour that I normally use is quite a lot higher. I was a wee bit sceptical about the end product of the GH method, but curious enough to give it a go.

The GH recipe

I haven’t changed the recipe at all, just dropped off a few of the ‘alternatives’, and rewritten it slightly into a much easier to follow form.

1. Preheat the oven to 170-180°C

2. Sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl.

3. Rub in the butter and add the sugar.

4. Continue lightly kneading the mixture until it forms a dough.

5. Roll or press out the dough into a 15-18cm circle and put it onto a papered baking sheet.

6. Crimp the edges of the shortbread using your fingers and mark across it into six to eight portions and prick neatly with a fork.

7. Bake it in the oven for about 40 minutes-1 hour, until just coloured.

8. Take it out of the oven and cool it on the baking sheet. Dredge with caster sugar and break into portions when cold.

I like the the whole rustic handmade aesthetic, but if you prefer a properly round shape then of course you can use a 15-18cm sandwich tin, greased and with the bottom lined with greaseproof paper. According to GH you can also use a shortbread mould, which I’d never heard of until today. A quick google found one for sale at Lakeland, and now I want one!

The result

Despite my scepticism, what came out of the oven was actually pretty good. Not as good as the butter heavy semolina ones that I normally make, but a pleasant suprise.

The only real problem is that they were slightly burnt, which is odd because I had my oven at the bottom of the specified temperature range, for the shortest time listed, and with the fan off. The recipe is good, super quick and super easy, and the shortbread are tasty, just keep a careful eye on them in the oven and whip them out if they look like they are getting too dark.