They Can't All be Winners

After yesterday's soup success, I was feeling like a cooking bad ass. I was on a roll and wanted to try something else. I've always had this obsession with lemon shortbread cookies (after reading through recipes, it must be the approximate stick of butter per cookie that makes them so yummy!) but had never made them and wanted to give it a whirl.

I think maybe it was my sous chef who steered me wrong. The recipe I found didn't sound difficult and required limited ingredients. I didn't even have to buy eggs! 

An entire stick of butter (and I halfed the recipe), sugar, vanilla, and lemon zest.

Flour and salt.

When I mixed them together, I expected to get a dough-like consistency. Instead, it ended up like slightly clumpy flour and was very dry. I read and reread the recipe, expecting I had missed some major source of moisture. Nope. Nothing. The recipe then called for you to shape your mixture into a block and refrigerate for a few hours. I could see this venture was heading south quickly and if I continued to follow the directions, I would only end up with a pile of slightly chilled flour. Here's where I went rogue:

I decided to pack about half of my powdery dough into a mini muffin pan and hope for the best.

I just couldn't bear to toss the rest of the dough, so I thought it would be a brilliant idea to squeeze the juice from the lemon I had zested into the bowl to firm up the dough. It helped a bit and I was able to scoop some spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet.

In the end I guess it could have been a lot worse. The muffin style cookies are kind of like shortbread bricks (I think I packed too tightly) and the globular cookies are super lemony. They both taste like shortbread but are in no way ready for public consumption. I think I will leave Lemon Shortbreads to the experts at Harry and David!