Recipe Review: Buttery Vanilla Shortbread by Food and Wine

According to my mum, my love for shortbread has spanned the ages. 

Ok, I will try to avoid dramatics but since I have been in diapers, I have been eating shortbread cookies.
Now, I still eat it but not as much.

Buttery Vanilla Shortbread

Shortbread cookies are definitely a holiday staple. It is a treat for any day really but I always buy mine. I have never had any reason to make it myself; maybe I just do not care enough. I liked the shortbread I grew up eating, so I never saw the need to make it myself. 

That said, this is a part of the holiday eats series. You can find other holiday-themed recipe reviews by clicking the holiday eats label beneath this blog post.

I decided to try the shortbread cookies recipe from food and wine. I have never tried any recipe from this website before so this was a first. I chose this recipe because it looks simple and I had all the essential baking ingredients available.

If you have not seen it, check out my list of essential baking ingredients, this will be especially helpful during the holidays.

Back to my review of the Buttery Vanilla Shortbread recipe from food and wine

Buttery Vanilla Shortbread

The recipe and instructions

The ingredients are things you probably have already. There is no rice flour or corn flour in this recipe. The instructions are simple to follow. It involves mixing the dry ingredients, then add the butter and vanilla. 

After mixing, you roll the dough in between two parchment sheets and take off the top parchment sheet. 

Then you score the cookie dough into the number of cookies you want and poke the dough with a fork or skewer. Afterward, you put it in the freezer until firm and proceed to bake it. 

When the baking time has elapsed, you cut the cookies into bars using the shallow cuts you made before baking.
Overall, it was a simple process, however; the cookies had burned even before the baking time elapsed so I believe the stated baking time is too long.

Buttery Vanilla Shortbread

The texture

As bad as this may seem, aside from the easy to follow recipe and instructions, the texture was the next best part of this recipe. These cookies had the right shortbread texture. It was tender but not soft. It held together well but still left little crumbs on the plate.

The taste

This is where this review takes a downturn. The shortbread cookies made with this recipe were practically tasteless. The sweetness is minimal, and that was expected but there was no prominent flavor in this cookie. The butter did not shine through and the vanilla flavor was MIA.

 I gave this cookie to a taste tester, and she said that the cookies tasted like bland bread. The taste of the flour though, was obvious.

The appeal of shortbread is in the taste and the texture but this recipe lacked the most important thing, the flavor.

It made me wonder if this recipe was tested before being posted on the food and wine website. I tried to leave a review but could not. This recipe also has a 5-star rating with over 2300 people rating yet there was a single negative comment below the recipe.

Do I recommend this recipe?

Definitely not. It may seem like a simple recipe but why use the time and ingredients to make tasteless and over baked shortbread.

I feel the proportions of this recipe was wrong and this shows in the yield of this recipe.

Thank you for reading my recipe review, if you enjoy it and would like to read more reviews, subscribe and follow me on social media. I love to read from you.

No comments

Post a Comment

Professional Blog Designs by pipdig