irn-bru shortbread experiment

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I am always game for trying out some different form of shortbread. And what could be more Scottish than Irn-Bru shortbread?

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I found and used a recipe I came across online on the Scotsman website, and guess what? It was a total failure. I read the ingredients for the Irn-Bru filling a few times, and it didn’t seem possible that it could come together as an ‘icing-like’ filling – and voilà, it absolutely did not. I don’t see how this could work as published, so because I didn’t have time to mess about experimenting, I used the shortbread cookies (the recipe below worked beautifully) and made a chocolate filling instead:

Shortbread
125g granulated sugar
250g unsalted butter (I used half salted, half unsalted)
375g flour

Soften butter to room temperature. Mix butter and sugar until well-combined.
Add flour and mix gently with a pastry blender/mixer until dough almost comes together, which will take about five minutes.

Gather dough together and knead lightly on a floured surface. Roll dough to roughly 1/4-inch thickness. Cut into desired shapes. Reroll excess dough up to 3 times. Bake at 265 F (130 C) for about 50 minutes.

You will be making a filling from Irn-Bru and white chocolate and creating nice wee shortbread sandwich cookies. If you follow the recipe, I don’t see how it can work at all. But if you do try it and the following info works for you, enlighten me. All I can think of is that somehow “double cream” differs from “heavy cream”, but I don’t think so.

1 bottle or can of Irn-Bru soda
100g of white chocolate
50g double cream
Pinch of salt

Combine white chocolate and double cream over a double boiler until combined. Let cool and mix in 4 tablespoons of Irn-Bru. Use a piping bag to fill each sandwich. I got what was very much like soup as a result, so no piping bag, no Irn-Bru filling.

Et voilà… in the end, it was not a thoroughly Scottish treat.

Lemon in all its forms – Think pink: Lemon sandwich cookies with raspberry filling

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When I know I am going to do a big bake, I sometimes ask for requests – everyone has favorites. I got an enthusiastic request for something lemon – anything lemon. And lemon raspberry wouldn’t hurt either (since most lemon lovers are pretty addicted to the crack-like but luscious addictive nature of lemon raspberry bars).

I went to my go-to lemon cookie recipe after looking around and finding a far more complicated lemon cookie recipe. Why not just use what I know?

I baked these up and whipped up some raspberry buttercream to turn the cookies into sandwiches. I had frozen some very decadent cream-laden vanilla frosting and just added a bunch of de-seeded raspberry jam and a dot of red food coloring to make the frosting just slightly pinker.

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Into the pink…

Baking ambitions – Almost reached! Sweets for Oslo on Thursday

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Oslo folks, so deprived all summer, will welcome the return of my obsession with baking. Probably. 🙂

I did not get as far as I wanted with my baking plans. It amazes me, though, that I got as far as I did. I really did not have that much time but still managed some of the plan. The final list is below with my wishful-thinking plans crossed out (undoubtedly to be baked sometime soon).

My ambitious baking plan included:

Shortbread
Carrot-sandwich cookies
Anzac biscuits
Cranberry-pistachio biscotti (altered: Cranberry-blueberry-cashew biscotti)
Tart cherry, blueberry and toasted pine nut biscotti
Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies (altered: Oreo-stuffed peanut butter cookies, recipe provided in another post)
Smil-filled chocolate cookies (Rolos really would be better! But it is yet another thing unavailable to me in Sweden! How can I do my biggest, best bakes without Rolos? Without endless waterfalls of chocolate chips?)
Samoa cookies
Nanaimo bars
Mini cheesecakes with Oreo crust
Oatmeal lemon cream bars*
Caramel apple crumble bars*
Kahlua coffee cupcakes*
Malted milk chocolate cupcakes*
Brown sugar cupcakes with maple frosting and candied bacon*
Carrot pineapple spice cupcakes*

Added after the fact: Peanut butter cup-stuffed M&M cookies! (I used the linked recipe but used M&Ms instead of chocolate chips since I can’t easily get chocolate chips here in Sweden; used Reese’s peanut butter cups instead of brownies as the stuffing.)

*recipe, photos and taste-test verdicts to follow

Oh and how Canadian of me to have both Nanaimo bars and maple frosting!

Watching Al Jazeera English program Witness: Truth on Trial about an international war crimes tribunal, prosecuting a Rwandan priest for allegedly perpetrating acts of genocide.

Sometimes when I watch things like this or think about things like what happened in Rwanda – and things that happen all over the world all the time, I wonder how it is I can bother with baking or care about some of the petty things I bother with.

Decisions, bartering and resistance: On trading and the nature of rural neighbors

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Weekly baking plans and daily soundtrack

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