Shortbread... always always with Preserves

I'm thinking of renaming this blog Truth in Baking.

When you look up a baking recipe online or in a cookbook there will be lies.  The first is the estimated time.  I've never seen one that was honest. Buried in the text and instructions will be more lies.  Most recipes start with butter and sugar.  Recipes will tell you to blend them or mix them for an arbitrary amount of time.  They don't say "Do not proceed until the butter and sugar are one substance".  Which is what you actually need to know. You should not be able to distinguish the butter from the sugar if they're mixed properly. If you have lumps of butter your results will not be what you were aiming for. There, some truth in baking.  But this blog is about shortbread.    

Shortbreads come in handy in two ways. They're really easy. They have no egg or leavening (baking powder or soda). I only know two people with egg allergies, but still, handy to know! They do typically need refrigeration before baking which will add to your prep time. I like preserves and I like to use them in baking.

My other shortbread recipe, I stumbled upon because I missed Kolaches, a wonderful Texas-Czech pastry. I had a friend who had a grandmother who made something called Kolaches and we did make them one afternoon but those weren't the Kolaches I was missing. When I started baking a few years later I discovered another Kolache recipe. It is really good, but does require rolling and cutting the dough into squares, very time consuming. It's also nothing like the picture on the website. So when I stumbled upon a thumbprint shortbread with preserves, where I got to skip rolling out dough. I thought I'd give it a whirl.

The recipe I wanted to try was a shortbread thumbprint cookie with my new favorite: raspberry preserves. The recipe calls for seedless, but I spent 30 seconds looking for those and figured some seeds never hurt anybody. It also calls for a glaze.  I'm not quite sure why you'd pour some more sugar over a cookie, so I'm subbing some melted dark chocolate.

I used a piping bag to drizzle which is a new experiment. It just adds a little control. I was afraid the chocolate would melt the bag because it was pretty hot, but no troubles. After eating one, I may use the regular glaze on the second half of the batch just to see how it tastes.