Holiday Shortbread Cookies … sugar & spice and everything nice!

Holiday Shortbread Cookies … Sugar and spice AND everything nice, these are the most addictive cookies ever. Light, buttery, delicately spiced, the cut out holiday shortbread cookies are quick to make and perfect for the festive platter. Its been a busy holiday season and I’ve baked non stop, taken pictures forever, yet haven’t found a moment to blog.

While an eggless fruit cake is quintessential over the holidays, cookies is what I enjoy doing the most. Most festive, most fun and so quick, like instant gratification. That said, this Eggless Christmas Plum Cake I baked yesterday turned out to be the best I’ve ever made, deep, moist and bursting with holiday flavours, one bite and I was smitten!

That recipe is inspired from a vegan Christmas cake I discovered on The Veg Space, by far the most interesting eggless fruit cake I’ve made so far, the tastiest as well. My version is deeply flavoured with a homemade caramel, fresh orange juice, Gingerbread spice mix from Aldi’s UK, currants and a Christmas fruit mix from there too, generous portions of homemade ghee / clarified butter, mixed nuts like pecans, almonds and cashews, crystallized ginger, candied peel of course. Last months trip to London was well worth it and I came home loaded with all my favourite holiday ingredients and of course, loads of inspiration.

Getting back to baking, interestingly, the egg free Christmas Plum Cake is a quick last minute cake, the fruits, juice, spices and ghee, YES GHEE, all simmer away over the stove top for a bit. What follows is a bit of drama when you add baking soda to the mixture and you have ferociously exciting frothing much like a witches cauldron. Then you magically stir in the flour and voila, you have batter! That the Eggless Christmas Plum Cake was rich, moist and sliced so well makes it my most special plum cake to date, the recipe still sitting in my notes. Thank you so much Kate.

If you know me well enough, you might know that I bake with ghee or clarified butter more often than not. This one thing makes all my eggless bakes far too delicious.

Making desserts with ghee / clarified butter instead of butter has been my most favourite hack to baking eggless for a decade now. Its an open secret, one I share quite happily all the time. Some folk are sceptical about it but most are converts once they try baking with ghee. The Eggless Raspberry Orange Cream Cake above and the Baileys Eggless Brownie Trifle, the very Christmassy Pistachio Raspberry Glass Dessert are some other desserts I’ve made during the past few weeks, and they all use ghee instead of butter!

As I sit here early on Christmas day sipping a cup of hot coffee and nibbling on the fruit cake and shortbread cookies, I’m swept by nostalgia of the dozens of cookies I use to bake when the kids were small.

Beginning 2007, there were always cookies! Doily/lace cookies, chocolate pretzels, salted butter and chocolate chunk wholegrain shortbread, orange shortbread, almond shortbread, pink peppercorn shortbread, stained glass cookies, cheese cookies, Smartie cookies, Linzer cookies, jam cookies, pecan cookies, sables, thumbprint cookies, Anzacs, chippers … and there have been plenty!

I’ve baked shortbread for ever, one of the easiest cookies to bake and some of the tastiest too. Shortbread cookies were some of the earliest ones I learnt to make and as far as I can remember, 25 years ago too every Christmas always had cut out shortbread cookies. They were the first to go, disappeared the quickest.

There is something eternally charming about cut out cookies and the holidays. I tasted my first British shortbread in the UK in the late 1980s and I was amazed that 3 simple, staple ingredients could offer so much deliciousness. Walkers Shortbread were iconic back then and very much iconic still, buttery and rich, so easily identifiable by the tartan packaging.

My Holiday Shortbread Cookies on the other hand are much lighter, spiced in fun interesting ways and always cut into shapes. You can either make them just with very basic ingredients, else flavour them up in beautiful holiday spices.

I love spices and grabbed a few jars of Gingerbread Spice Mix while in the UK last month so I knew just what I was going to use. That spice combined with fresh orange zest, vanilla bean paste and the delicate bite of chopped pecans made these shortbread cookies very special! Do try baking them! Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Stay safe..

Holiday Shortbread Cookies

Sugar and spice AND everything nice, these are the most addictive cookies ever. Light, buttery, delicately spiced, the cut out holiday shortbread cookies are quick to make and perfect for the festive platter.

Makes about 2 dozen 2 inch cookies depending on the size of the cookie cutters

Print Recipe Pin Recipe

Prep Time 15 minutes mins

Cook Time 20 minutes mins

Cooling 30 minutes mins

Total Time 1 hour hr 5 minutes mins

Course Snack

Cuisine British

Servings 6 people

Equipment

• 1 Large bowl
• 1 whisk
• 1 spatula

Ingredients

  

• 100 g clarified butter / ghee room temperature {or softened butter}
• 100 g castor sugar
• 25 g almond flour {4 tbsp}
• 10 g cornstarch / cornflour {1 tbsp}
• 1 tsp gingerbread spice mix
• Zest of 1 orange
• 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste {or vanilla extract}
• 25 g pecans finely chopped {1/4 cup}
• Pinch of salt
• 125 g all purpose flour maida

Instructions

 

• Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
• In a large bowl, using a balloon whisk, whisk together the clarified butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Whisk in the almond flour, cornstarch, gingerbread spice mix, orange zest, vanilla, pecans and a pinch of salt.
• Fold in the flour and bring it together into a semi soft cookie dough. If the dough feels too soft, fold in an extra tbsp of flour.
• Divide into two, roll out to a 1/4 thickness and cut out shapes using cookie cutters.
• Place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Place the trays in the freezer while you preheat the oven to 140C.
• Bake for approximately 20 minutes until the cookies are a light golden brown.
• Remove from the oven and immediately sift over castor sugar {optional} and leave to cool completely on the tray.
• Store in an airtight box.

Notes

1. You can use butter instead of ghee. I make these often with homemade sweet butter, sometimes with Kerrygold unsalted Irish butter.
2. You can skip the almond meal and use plain flour instead.
3. Alternatively, add in whole almonds to the plain flour and blend until fine. That works just as well
4. Since the recipe uses very basic ingredients, use the best quality ingredients you can find.

Keyword baking, christmas, cookie, eggfree, eggless, eggless baking, no eggs, shortbread, simple, vegetarian