Clotted cream shortbread

When I was younger I went on a lot of family holidays to Cornwall and of the many fab memories I have, I remember lots of cream teas and I remember coming home with loads of shortbread for family members, and maybe a couple of boxes for the home biscuit tin too!

I had loads of clotted cream left over and so decided to make clotted cream shortbread. That was the easy part. Surprisingly there are very few clotted cream shortbread recipes about. So I adapted various other ones I have, I crossed everything and waited.

Clotted Cream Shortbread

makes ~20, dependant on size

75g clotted cream
75g butter, room temp
1 tsp vanilla paste or extract
75g caster sugar
200g plain flour
25g rice flour

Grease two baking sheets and preheat the oven to 170C/150C FAN. Soften the butter well with a wooden spoon. Add the clotted cream, vanilla and caster sugar to the bowl and cream by hand util everything is combined.

Add the flours and stir until the the mix comes together as a dough, you my need to press the remaining clumps together with your hands,  Lightly flour a surface and rolling pin and roll out the dough till about 1 cm thick. 

Cut out shapes with a cutter of your choice. Try and be clever with you stamping out. The more you work the dough the less short your short bread will be. Aim for just one or two re-rolls of the trimmings. Place the shapes on the prepared baking sheets.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until the shortbread biscuits are golden.

Transfer the biscuits to a wire rack and sprinkle with caster sugar while hot. 

Crossing everything worked! These were a delicious shortbread and perfect with a cup of tea/hot chocolate. Not entirely sure how long they keep for, about 3 days in my house!

I got a bit excited when I was coating them in sugar and decided to dye my sugar pink with a little bit of pink food gel. Well I had already cut out hearts so thought why not,  but don't they look pretty?