Lemon, White Chocolate and Blueberry Shortbread

                I’ve always loved being in the kitchen. I like cooking, but more than anything I like baking. I’ve been baking since I was little – I was making microwave cakes before I was 10, and my range has been increasing ever since. It took a back seat when I started university though: for a start, I didn’t have an oven in my first year. Then other things took over, which I may or may not decide to talk about at some point in the future.

                Suffice to say, I went from baking fairly often to hardly ever. But now life is taking a big change again – I’ve graduated and am starting work in a month, I’m moving house (again) and I’m working on some health issues. So I’ve decided that I’m going to add baking to that. It’s a hobby I used to love so it’s one I’m going to revive.

                New resolution made, the only thing to do was to decide on a recipe to try. Life has been a wee bit hectic with finals, results, moving and various summer trips, so I didn’t want to make anything too big, or which couldn’t be kept or easily shared. Browsing the (numerous) baking blogs I visit in my spare time, I stumbled across a recipe for Lemon, White Chocolate and Blueberry Shortbread on Piece of Cake, which you can find here. Its a combination of three things I absolutely love, with some healthy blueberries chucked in, so sounded perfect. I’ve been gradually accumulating the required ingredients over the past few days, and today I finally got around to baking them.

    

            The recipe is simplicity itself, and it doesn’t take long to mix the ingredients together into a gorgeous smelling (and tasting) cookie dough. The most time-consuming step is the chilling, with the recipe I used suggesting at least 3 hours in the fridge. When I do bake, I always chill my biscuit or cookie dough, but usually for no more than 30 minutes to an hour. I did check on these after an hour though, and they definitely needed more time to solidify, so I stuck with the recommendation. 

The other novelty in the recipe was the first step, combining the sugar and the lemon zest by hand. I’ve never seen this done anywhere else, but I think it did make a difference. The lemon flavour was spread much more evenly through the finished product, and was more prominent than I expected, which was a very pleasant surprise. I had fun rubbing the oily zest into the sugar until it was moist too – though I had to convince myself that the resulting mix really should go into my batter and not into my stomach! Still, I might make the sugar-zest mix as a filling for pancakes or puff pastry biscuits at some point in the future…

When it came to slicing the dough, I struggled a bit. My knife kept getting caught on chocolate chips and refusing to go through neatly. The cookies turned out slightly less regular than I’d hoped, and I think the error may have been mine. Seeing how much they spread out during baking, I’ve reached the conclusion that next time, the biscuit log needs to be longer and thinner, and the cookies themselves need to be cut a bit thicker.

Still, the end result was heavenly. A gorgeous lemony crumbly cookie with punches of white sugar and blackberry…this was always going to be a combination I’d love and it certainly didn’t disappoint! I’m usually pretty restrained about tasting things straight out of the oven, but one of these beauties crumbled as I was putting it on the cooling rack and it would have been silly not to put it out of its misery there and then! 

Enjoy!