Marguerite Shortbread

Marguerite cookies, originally uploaded by cherryleader.

Baked this for my lab's weekly meeting. These shortbread gave amazing smell when they were still in the oven. The boyfriend said that these are actually what his mom used to bake when he was little, and they were called "melting moments". It's surprising for me to hear that, especially when I actually got this recipe from a chinese book forum. They call these "Lady Marguerite who lives in ... (insert some exotic name of Italian town here)".

I (still) don't have the kitchen scale. So I have to convert all the ingredients from grams to cups. Apparently the conversion was not that accurate, leaving the dough with a fairly dry texture, almost too dry to hold together. In fact I had to add extra melting butter just to roll out the dough. After the chilling time the dough was incredibly hard, but luckily when I knead them into small balls the dough was softened by the body temperature and much easier to manage. I particularly like the little cracks around the edge of the shortbread after I pressed downeach small ball with my measuring cup. Also because of the lack of butter, the centre cracked a bit after baking. But they still look cute, don't they?

Marguerite Shortbread

100g butter, room temperature
60g icing sugar
2 hard-boiled egg yolks
100g plain flour
100g cornflour

1. Cut the butter into small pieces. Beat the butter with icing sugar until light and fluffy.
2. Sift the egg yolks into the butter mixture. Mix well.
3. Mix and sift the flour into the butter mixture.
4. Knead into a dough. Chill in fridge for 1 hour. Preheat oven to 170 C.
5. Divide and knead the dough into small portions. Press them down.
6. Bake for about 25 min.