Tender Shortbread Bars Dressed 3 Ways

Up until a couple years ago, shortbread to me was simply cookies. I had never seen it in bars, and I remember when I first saw shortbread in bar form at Jordan's house I thought it was such a strange thing. Obviously I was intrigued because to me dipping a bar or a triangle into chocolate would be a much simpler and cleaner task than dipping a round cookie in chocolate.

The other day as I was perusing blogs I came across a recipe for the last shortbread recipe you will ever need. Needless to say I was intrigued. Not only due to the fact that it was one of those "BEST EVER" recipe sort of deals, but because it was in bar form, and I've never personally tried my hand at making shortbread bars, really I haven't had much practice with cookie bars other than the sugar cookie ones (these are the only ones that stand out to me right now).

This was a fun recipe to work with because the dough was so buttery and smoothe, and I didn't have to take my time and shape the dough into meticulous little balls, I could just take a loaf/cake pan and squish'er in.

This really is an absolutely amazing recipe. When it comes to shortbread, this is it. This is your traditional Scottish shortbread. It's buttery but not heavy. It's so tender that it literally crumbles as you pick it up, which makes it harder to cut into bars, but from what I've heard from a few different people Scottish shortbread is actually just pieces they break, there aren't really "even" pieces. This shortbread was seriously sinful. It was literally lip smacking good. I cannot tell you how many pieces my family went through on the first day I made it. I split this recipe into three groups, because I wanted to have a traditional shortbread and then change up the shortbread in two other ways. With that being said, we probably went through 1/3 of the recipe.

I kept everything in the recipe the same, however for the other two recipes I changed it a bit. The first one I made was a cardamom and vanilla. So I added 1 tsp cardamom and 1 tsp vanilla. This delivered such a great taste. The texture was slammin' and the taste was just perfection. The next one I made was the lavender and for this one I added 1 tsp dried lavender and when it was out of the oven I immediately sprinkle sea salt on top. This added a really nice touch. The lavender was not overpowering, even my mom who's been opposed to lavender before devoured the lavender one, literally she ate the majority of it. With the added salt it seemed to calm the lavender but just add that extra note that was needed. The only thing however, is that I found the texture in the lavender one to be different. It was in for less time, but it actually browned, the other two were a beautiful white-yellow hue where as this was more of a brown, errr... not sure what went wrong but the taste was definitely still delivered.

This recipe is certainly a shortbread keeper, I will be posting MY shortbread cookie recipe that my mom and I have been using for years. This will be my bar go-to recipe, and the recipe I will eventually be posting will be the one for my go-to shortbread cookie recipe!

Hope you'll try this recipe out because it certainly is magnificent.

Go get yourself a mug of tea and dig in!