Delicious and Easy Shortbread

I wanted to make some shortbread to go with a Lemon-Lime Satin Cream I was making for dessert. I found this excellent recipe at: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/shortbread-recipe. It is very flexible. The King Arthur site has a number of suggestions for serving it, including drizzling it with caramel, or spreading melted chocolate on top and decorating it with nuts. It has only five ingredients.

Ingredients

- 1 cup (2 sticks) salted butter, at cool room temperature. (It needs to be soft enough to mix with the other ingredients, but still solid. Do not melt it.) King Arthur suggests using a top-quality butter because the butter is such a critical ingredient for this recipe.
- 1 cup confectioners' sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1/4 teaspoon almond extract - optional. Or use another flavor of your choice, like eggnog flavor.
- 2 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 300°F. Lightly grease two round 9" cake pans. If you worry about the shortbread sticking to the pans, line them with parchment paper and grease the parchment. (I used parchment.)

2. In a medium-sized bowl, beat together the butter, sugar, vanilla extract and almond extract. Then beat in the flour. The mixture may seem a little dry at first. Keep beating until it comes together. (It took a while for me to do this, but I think it's because the butter was too firm. I used a wooden spoon to beat these ingredients.) If it absolutely won't come together, dribble in up to 1 tablespoon of water until it does. This is a stiff dough.

3. Divide the dough in half. (If you have a kitchen scale, each half will weigh about 10 & 1/2 ounces.) Press each half of the dough into one of the prepared pans, smoothing the surface with your fingers or a mini rolling pin. (I used a mini rolling pin.)

4. Use a fork to prick the dough all over. This allows any steam to escape and prevents the shortbread from bubbling as it bakes. Prick the dough in a random pattern, but it looks nicer pricked with some kind of symmetry.

5. Bake the shortbread until it's light golden brown across the surface, and a deeper golden brown around the edges, about 35 minutes.

6. Remove it from the oven and immediately turn each shortbread round out onto a clean surface.

7. Using a pizza wheel or sharp knife, cut each round into 12 wedges. (Do this while the shortbread is still warm. If you wait until it's cool, it won't cut easily.) Transfer the shortbread wedges to a rack to cool. (I recommend using a spatula to transfer the wedges so they're not likely to break.)

8. Serve as is or decorate.