Sorry it took so long, but here are the muffins discussed at some length back on February 4th.
FULL BREAKFAST BRAN MUFFINS
Honesty compels me to admit the low-fat version was an accident ( I was melting the butter on the woodstove in another room, and you know what they say about “out of sight…”). But it turns out these muffins are very tasty – maybe even tastier – when the only butter you use is used to grease the cups. Just be warned that that’s tasty, not tender; texture is definitely better when you put the butter in. And muffins made with no added fat get stale a lot faster.
For 12 muffins:
1 cup wheat bran
1 1/3 cups whole milk yogurt
¼ cup butter (optional, see above), plus butter for the pan(s)
1 ¾ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 ½ tsp. fresh* baking powder
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp salt, or a bit more if it’s unsalted butter
2 extra-large eggs
¼ cup lightly piled* brown sugar
¼ cup molasses
3 tbl. wheat germ
¾ cup light or dark raisins or diced dried apricots or any combination thereof.
1. Set oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a small bowl, mix the bran with about half the yogurt. Set aside. In another small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
3. Melt the butter if using. Heavily butter a dozen* 1/3-cup muffin cups.
4. Use the whisk to lightly beat the eggs, then beat in the remaining yogurt, brown sugar, molasses, wheat germ and reserved bran mixture.
5. Switch to a large mixing spoon and quickly stir in the fruit lumps, then the flour mixture. Distribute among the prepared muffin cups, filling them 3/4 to 4/5 full (these don’t rise all that much). Bake until well browned and dry-toothpick producing, about 20 minutes. Cool briefly in the pan before turning out onto a rack or into the breadbasket.
* Fresh Baking Powder: Unless you’re really big for biscuits or belong to Cornbread Nation, it’s quite likely your can of baking powder has been around long enough to lose lifting power. If you have reason to suspect staleness, dissolve a teaspoon or so in a half cup of hot water and watch for vigorous fizzing. Medium fizzing is ok – just use 2 teaspoons. But languid bubbles or none at all mean it’s time for a new can.
*Measuring Brown Sugar: Because brown sugars vary so much in comparative loft, the famous instruction “tightly packed” helps ensure accuracy when you’re measuring by volume. But I can’t bring myself to call for “2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons tightly packed brown sugar,” which is about the amount you want. (In theory, tight packing also smooths lumps. In theory. )
* Muffin Cups: Hold quite different amounts, so it pays to measure. It also pays to use two 6-cup pans instead of one that holds a dozen. The 2 in the middle of a 12 cupper don’t get as much heat as those on the outside, so they tend to rise less and cook less quickly.
We are back in the cold again, but there’s something temporary about it and the snowdrops are here already, earlier this year than ever before in our 15 years in this house. They must have came up sometime around New Years’, because they were in full bloom when we first saw them, on January 31st.
It’s just one valiant little clump – over on the north side of the yard, underneath a group of tall hemlocks, beside the now- pointless privet hedge that used to screen a patio. That little slope will soon sprout creeping phlox and forget-me-nots and columbines and willowy hyacinths from the forced pots of years and years gone by, but in the early season it’s just green – or brown or white , depending – and those chaste-looking little flowers: white bells with dots or strokes of green that you must tip them up to see.
They’re probably Galanthus nivalis, or elwesii, I’ve never taken the time to see for sure. There are about 13 species of Galanthus, whose name comes from Greek words for milk and flower, and dozens and dozens of cultivars. Most of them bloom super-early, often through the snow. But according to the RHS , ” snowdrop” is not an environmental reference; it comes to us from the German Schneetropfen, a style of earring popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.
I’m not sure I believe this. Germans have been plant-conscious for a lot longer than a few centuries and it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn the earrings were named for the flowers. * In any case, the Society also says: “Several English vernacular names pre-date the name snowdrop, including Candlemas bells and fair maids of February, both of which are associated with Candlemas Day, 2 February, which is the peak of the flowering season.”
American bulb-sellers don’t offer anything like the assortment available to the Brits, but for a look at the possibilities, check out http://www.judyssnowdrops.co.uk. When you do, you’ll see dozens of subtle differences. You’ll also see that they’re all little white bells, and will probably be reconciled to the selections offered by http://www.munchkinnursery.com. http://www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com and http://www.johnscheepers.com/.
Because snowdrops bloom in spring, catalog sellers often put them in the autumn offerings and they often sell dry bulbs to plant along with the tulips and things. But most authorities agree that snowdrops should be planted “in the green,” and that is certainly when you should divide them, if you have access to a patch. I’ll post instructions here in early March.
Snowdrops are long lived and seldom bothered, though in wet years they get a fungus disease related to the one that whacks peonies, and in places where early spring is warm, they’re vulnerable to the narcissus bulb fly – a pernicious creature that should be called the amaryllis bulb fly. (Galanthus, like Narcissus, is in the Amaryllidaceae.) If you summer your amaryllis outside and have had trouble with bulbs that went hollow in the middle, it’s likely you’d see a fat hideous bulb-fly grub if you cut one in half. To avoid this problem in future, don’t put your amaryllis out until July, after the flies have laid their eggs.
*Note: After the podcast, my German friend Ilse wrote in to say that she grew up calling snowdrops Schneeglöckchen (snow bells). But she is only in her 80’s, so that may be the (comparatively) modern name.
Okay, 40 degrees and rainy doesn’t fix it. It’s been November for months and it looks like it’s going to keep right on BEING November right through February. Only thing for it is to work hard at getting the garden orders together, then go in the kitchen and bake something – like maybe bran muffins.
Let me start by confessing that up until a couple of weeks ago, I had not eaten a bran muffin for – I dunno – 20 years. Then my friend M., who prides herself on her bran muffins, gave us a whole plateful. VERY tasty. And very conveniently filling : have one of these mothers for breakfast and you’re all set until lunch. They were toasty tasting without being toasted, chock full of raisins, and reminiscent of gingerbread in their overtones of molasses.
Almost perfect, in other words, except for being just slightly sweeter than my ideal, and a bit less wheaty.
Reason suggests the way to deal with this is to ask for the recipe, then modify . We are not talking about fancy pastry here; muffins are among the most forgiving baked goods in all creation. You can almost always cut back some on sugar without destroying the crumb, and getting a stronger grain flavor is often as simple as upping the salt.
But no, that would be too… well, anyway, I started fooling around with recipes. Go to your cookbook collection and look up a few – turns out they call for differing amounts of every major ingredient: flour, bran, sugar, eggs, fat, you name it. Yield varies too: 8 muffins, 10 muffins, 9 muffins. For reasons that are probably related to the non-divisibility of eggs, there are very few recipes for 6 muffins or 12 muffins, numbers that are, as you may have noticed, favorites with makers of muffin pans.
I have every expectation that version 4 – coming up shortly – will finally produce my ideal bran muffin, and getting there has been half the fun. It will be posted here when it’s ready, so you can start playing too.
On the garden front, a few less-common catalogs:
Baker Creek Heirloom seeds: www.rareseeds.com. One of my favorites for the food garden. You have to read between the lines – the descriptions are sort of like olive grading, where giant is the smallest and they aren’t actually large until you get to super colossal. And Baker Creek is in Missouri, so they do much better with things like melons and eggplants than Northerners are likely to. But THAT at least they’re forthright about. The prices are fair. The service is good. And the selection is splendid: about 80 kinds of winter squash, really a lot of whacky eggplants, stuff like that.
Select seeds antique flowers: www.selectseeds.com. The name says it all, and although it IS mostly seeds, this is also a good place to get small plants of unusual tender things like blue-flowered thunbergia, a fancy ( and alas rather fussy) relative of good old black eyed Susan vine.
Arrowhead Alpines: www.arrowheadalpines.com. This guy is a master of that esoteric artform: the fabulously cranky plant catalog. It’s all text, no drawings or photos. No common names. There are no climate zones. Pot sizes are hinted at but not always given and not guaranteed. You pays yer money – which tends to be quite a lot of it, especially after you add in the shipping – and you gets what they have to send you. The kicker of course is that what they have to send you is all sorts of rare treats, grown by genuine plant nuts who really love their metier.
Responses.
As promised, more on keeping the deer from driving you to a garden composed entirely of barberries and gravel:
* Smelly rope trick: Instead of ( or in addition to ) spraying, you can soak cotton clothesline in odor based repellent and run it as deer nose level fencing around your perennial beds. Easiest installation is through eye hooks screwed into wooden posts, but if you use cup hooks for the running length and thumb-latches at the ends, it’s easy to remove the string and resoak it from time to time.
* A loose dog (confined by an invisible fence) works very well – assuming you choose a dog that doesn’t do more damage than the deer do. But it only works in good weather because it only works when the dog is out there. And of course high maintenance does not even begin to describe it. This is really just a suggestion to consider springing for the fence if you already HAVE a dog.
* Wireless fence: described and sold at wirelessdeerfence.com. This is a set of posts that attract deer, then deliver a painful shock that teaches them to stay away. Same principle as a baited electric fence and – according to the manufacturer – just as effective without all that wire.
* Hunting. If you don’t like the idea of guns on the property, consider putting out the word that bow-hunters would be welcome. Unlike the deer, whose population numbers are exploding, hunters are an endangered species. Average age is somewhere around 50, but they are still around
* Community action: Deer lovers in some communities have instituted sterilization programs. And who knows? King Canute did not have notable success at the ocean’s edge, but maybe he didn’t throw enough money at the project. You can read about one effort in this direction – and see pictures of doctors operating on the deer – here.
* Permanent Fencing ( in the end that’s where you always wind up), is well if dauntingly described by ATTRA, which also goes over a great deal else.
Note: In fairness, it should be said that Canute knew he would fail, he was just trying to prove his human limitations to a bunch of sycophants.
Today I come to you directly from a jolly therapy session; half an hour of poking around at our big orange jasmine, scraping off the scale. The therapy is for the plant, not me – those houseplant gurus are thinking wishfully when they say this kind of screwing around has a calming effect. But it does remind me to remind you to go peer closely at your indoor greenery for signs of unwanted life. Midwinter is explosion time for aphids, whiteflies and scale. Like all of us, the plants have had it with short dark days and dry stale air.
The jasmine, a murraya, actually, is also getting a course of drenchings with insecticidal soap. You know the drill: Put the plant in the tub. Spray the hell out of it, being sure to get the undersides of the leaves. Leave it in place overnight. Next day, put a sheet of plastic over the pot surface to protect the soil, weight it with a few shampoo bottles or whatever, so it doesn’t slip, then draw the curtains and give the plant a long, gentle, tepid shower.
Is that it? No it’s not. Once there are enough bugs to see, there are enough bugs to breed, and it usually takes 2 or 3 treatments to get rid of them. Why bother? In the case of the murraya, fragrant flowers all year round, in batches every couple of months. The full name is Murraya paniculata, and they are not all that uncommon – I got mine at a local nursery that offers them every winter.
BTW, the shower part is a good idea even for plants that don’t have bugs… not only will they look better without dust, they’ll be able to absorb more sunlight. Needless to say, this advice does not apply to cactus or to damp-hating succulents like aloes and jades.
* Nothing like fooling around with the houseplants to make you want to head outdoors, to refill the birdfeeder if nothing more. And while we’re out here, allow me to recommend the hanging wire mesh conical collapsing basket model, currently playing at a hardware store near you. They’re terrif: unobtrusive, welcoming to multiple birds and difficult for squirrels to get at – — also hard for larger perching birds, as we discovered by watching one poor female cardinal ( the winter’s loveliest bird, in my opinion) swooping hopefully by the sides without being able to land. To solve this problem , stick a few lengths of thin bamboo stake through the mesh, letting them protrude just a few inches on each side. As long as you choose a very thin stakes, the perches are too flimsy to support anything bigger than a bird.
* And finally, a nice tidbit for lovers of Jamaican food: there is suddenly quite a bit of goat meat around, probably a happy outgrowth of the goat cheese boom. This is not tender young kid, it’s grown goat. Wonderful for curries and stews, but tough and I do mean tough. You’d think a 2 inch piece of anything would get tender after 2 and a half hours of stewing, but if you were thinking about goat you’d be wrong. Don’t forget to start dinner early.
Today is mostly a pair of creature features – deer vs. daylilies and squirrel counting comin’ right up. But first, a spoonful of recipe rescue at the request of my good friend Sue,
She called the other night in a panic –
“Is there anything you can add to make something less hot? ” Turns out she was making a big deal cioppino for a whole bunch of spice averse friends and she’d overdone the hot pepper flakes.
And this in spite of using far less than the recipe called for. Well, there isn’t anything you can add (except a great deal more of everything else). All she could do was make a quick batch of rice for people to pour their hot hot stew on top of. That and pass a bowl of sour cream, which is a horrible idea from the culinary standpoint but at least could keep people from starving. And please don’t write to say why not pasta – it doesn’t mitigate heat the way rice does.
In future, I suggested, take about a third of a cup of broth out and add the small amount of pepper to that. Then add the seasoned broth to the big pot o’ stuff until you like the result. Pause a moment between additions; it takes a while for the heat to disperse, and be sure to KEEP TASTING! This works for anything that might cause problems yet is added in such small quantities it’s easy to overdo. Truffle oil, for example, the most regrettably overused of yesterday’s trendy seasonings.
On to the deer, since I promised last week I’d give some tips for keeping them out of the daylilies.
Tip A number one is fencing. It was fencing before and it’s still fencing, but putting it on the list is sort of cheating because everybody knows it and everybody keeps hoping there’s something else and getting a dog doesn’t count.
So: repellents. Obviously, those that smell bad before they taste bad are better. Most of them keep smelling bad to deer even after they no longer smell bad to you, but it’s a good idea to try ’em out first – in – as they say of cleaning products – an unobtrusive spot.
A few brands with good reviews include: plantskydd , deer off , deer out, liquid fence, and deer chaser, but there are dozens. Those based on dried blood, garlic , rotten eggs, ammonia salts, peppermint , cinnamon or some combination thereof seem to work better than predator urine, probably because it doesn’t take deer long to figure out that the predator is not in the vicinity.
Choose at least 2 kinds and keep switching. Deer can become habituated to almost anything, so the more you can keep ’em off guard, the better. Start making the area repulsive when the scapes start growing, well before the buds develop, then spray the buds. If you have fragrant daylilies , stop when the buds are about half-swollen.
And although you don’t spray it on, don’t forget good old smelly soap: Dial and Irish Spring are favorites. Just put a few chips in a bag of cheesecloth and use a clothespin to attach the bag to a thin bamboo stake. The soap should be slightly above the lily buds. Other strategies to be posted shortly and meanwhile:
Please send me a squirrel count (ll@leslieland.com). Are you seeing more of ’em? Fewer? The same as usual? We are seeing none at all, though I hesitate to jinx things by mentioning it. Our birdfeeders have been overrun, winter and summer, for 15 years – ever since we came to this house – and this winter there are suddenly none. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Rien. I see them out in the world when I’m driving, so they are clearly still here with us on the planet…
Today’s focus is daylilies, which remind me of the old joke about fashions in Beantown: Young woman gets on the train next to a dowager wearing a beautiful chapeau. Youngster says “what a lovely hat. Where did you buy it?” Matron draws herself up and says “Buy my hat? My dear, in Boston, we HAVE our hats. ”
Similarly, almost all of us have our daylilies. Brand new garden-free houses are an exception, but any place that has had time for a few things to get planted has probably been planted with a few daylilies, and since the blessed things never die, whatever daylilies you had when you got there, whatever daylilies you planted 20 years ago when you were starting out, those are the daylilies you’ve still got.
Well, there’s a lot to be said for durability, but there are two things wrong with this. One is that daylilies do need dividing. They’re not as bad as some plants I could name, but after anywhere from 5 to 10 years they tend to get crowded and flower less. Then you have even MORE of whatever, which you must either find a place for or find someone to take them in ( in theory, you could just put them on the compost but who do you know who does that?)
And of course the other wrong thing, a natural outgrowth of wrong thing #1, is that your old daylilies prevent you from planting new daylilies – or at least daylilies that are new to you. And given that there are somewhere around 50,000 named daylilies, it’s quite likely that there are several you’d rather have than the ones you have at the moment.
Just about everybody sells them, and there’s an extensive list of sources (along with lots of other nifty info.) at www.daylies.org, the website of the American hemerocallis society. But no matter where you shop, don’t forget to notice bloom times: different nurseries go into this in greater and lesser detail, but at the minimum the listing or tag should say whether the plants flower early, midseason or late. It should also tell you whether the cultivar is a diploid or tetraploid.
Those terms refer to the sets of chromosomes in each cell, and they matter to you as well as to breeders because they tell you things about plant habit:
Diploids are closer to old-fashioned daylilies. They tend to have smaller flowers and more of them, and they tend to be less imposing, easier to integrate into mixed borders, sometimes floppy but almost always graceful .
Tetraploids are – well, beefy would be a word. The plants are usually robust. Stalks are stiff. Flowers are large and substantial and often very strongly colored.
The latest prize-winning introductions can cost as much as a good Paris hat – 2 or 3 hundred dollars for a single division – but there are gazillions of others in the 10 to 20 dollar range. Plenty of places offer plants for less, but as usual, there is a bottom price below which you are likely to get either low quality, very common plants or divisions so mingy you’ll have to wait a long time before much of anything happens.
Okay, what haven’t I mentioned? If you already have daylilies, you know: deer! They eat daylilies – or, more accurately they eat the flowers. Some tips on how to prevent this will appear here next week.
Once it’s too cold to just go outside in whatever you have on, it might as well snow, as far as I’m concerned. From the garden and home design point of view, snow is the great freebie of all time.
For one thing, it’s wonderful insulation, like tiny bubble bubble wrap. A thick layer on the garden keeps soil temperatures even, so you don’t get the freeze-thaw cycles that lift soil and rip roots from the ground. It also protects tender plant crowns from drying sun and wind. And old-timers know your house stays a lot warmer when there’s a good heap of snow all around the foundation. Of course, it will also stay a lot wetter if that foundation has issues.
But enough of practicality! the truly great thing about snow is it’s gorgeous. Even when it isn’t frosting dark tree limbs and setting off the statuary, it’s simplifying the landscape, unifying discordant elements, covering dead weeds and patchy grass like an act of natural forgiveness.
Of course nothing is perfect. There are two ungreat things about snow: one being that the stuff is heavy, the other that you usually have to remove some. Specifics vary but there is one huge big general rule: sooner is better than later, and the wetter the snow the truer that is.
Removing snow from trees and shrubs:
*Start by being sure you have to. Ice is a lot more likely to cause problems; most plants have lots of natural bending capacity, and being whacked is not frozen bark’s idea of a good time. But branches that stay deeply bent for more than a couple of days may never spring back, and if they must bear additional snow they may break under the load.
* When snow-removal is called for, use the brush end of a broom to gently and slowly push branches UPWARD until the snow falls off. The natural inclination is to push down, but of course that means the poor branch is getting hammered double.
* When you get done, consider bundling anything that’s especially vulnerable – arborvitaes, hemlocks and boxwoods, for instance. It only takes a few minutes to apply a loose wrapping of wide-mesh netting and secure it with a few twists of twine.
Removing snow from walkways:
* Even walks that appear to be on level ground often have uphill and downhill sides. Don’t forget to pile the snow on the downhill side, to minimize runoff over the path, and don’t forget to throw that pile well off to the side, so the runoff has somewhere to run. Are there thick shrubs in the way? Make a note on the April calendar to do something about that. I will too, and we can talk about solutions then.
* By now I hope it’s no longer news that using sodium chloride to melt ice is right up there with driving a Hummer for environmental bad behaviour: the stuff corrodes metal, flakes concrete and mortar, damages soil structure, wounds and kills plants, then pollutes both surface and groundwater. Regrettably, alternatives like magnesium chloride and calcium chloride aren’t all that much better. Yet having an icy walkway is also on the anti-social side. What to do?
Two choices – or three, if you’re feeling flush
Choice 1. After shoveling – or even better, before it starts snowing – use a de-icer based on Calcium Magnesium Acetate (CMA to its friends ). It’s still not great for the surface water, but it doesn’t tend to keep seeping down; it’s a lot less corrosive than the chlorides and it seldom damages plants.
Choice 2 : provide traction with coarse gravel, (non-clumping) kitter litter or anything similar. These products are benign outdoors and won’t come in if you keep a stiff bootbrush beside the door. On a somewhat grander scale, most big hardware and building supply stores sell stiff cleated traction mats. You do need to have a place to store them but other than that they’re effortless, and do not require you to nag anybody about entrance etiquette.
Choice 3: go for hot rubber – the electrified rubber mats used by restaurants and stores. At anywhere from 4 to 6 hundred bucks for a 3×5 or 6 foot section they are certainly the expensive spread; they do draw a fair amount of power; and they work best if you turn them on as soon as it starts snowing. But they last a long time, can be left in place all season, and if you love someone who has fragile bones, may well be worth every penny.
Or almost, anyway… The Hanukkah and Kwanzaa teams are not yet completely out of the woods, so for their sakes – and while I’m thinking about it – here are a few rules to wrap by if you’re keen to save a tree without having the presents look frumpy:
1. We are still waiting for the day when earth-friendly inclinations in this department are universally understood and admired. When in doubt, either go the safe route with new (recycled-content) paper; wrap the present in something else that is itself a present – a pretty new dish towel is the classic – or else don’t wrap it at all. The arts and crafts approach – using the funny papers, for instance – is as useful for saving money as it is for saving resources, so if you’re not careful it can just make you look cheap instead of green.
2. Homemade wrappings are only a good choice if you are good at these things and have plenty of time on your hands. My stepdaughter Celia makes such lovely collages out of bits of bark, twigs and old magazines we hate to open her presents, but if you’re not craftily inclined you end up with yet one more thing to do, and one more thing to feel inadequate about if you’re older than 10.
3. Reusing is more resource-protective than recycling, but it works best if you think of it before you’re sitting there surrounded by billowing waves of torn wrapping. Some tips:
* Tape is the enemy of paper, so before you start cutting and folding, stick a whole row of small tape pieces to the edge of a plate. If it’s easy to use less, you will.
* Consider reuse when buying paper. Mylar is difficult to crease, so if you don’t work at creasing it, it will come off the package looking as smooth as it did when it went on. Tissue paper wrinkles at the mere thought of being used, but tissue paper looks good wrinkled — if the wrinkling is thorough enough. Crush slightly-used paper into balls so it’s well and truly crinkly, like shirred fabric, then use multiple layers and multiple colors to give a festive effect.
* If you are, as I am, a sucker for gorgeous paper that has no redeeming social value outside of being beautiful, you can still amass plenty of green points by reusing as much of it as possible. The trick is to have a cardboard wrapper tube ( or tubes) handy at present-opening time, so you can roll up the used paper before some helpful relative folds it tightly into neat, deeply creased piles. Most of the smooth paper it takes to wrap a large box will remain completely new-looking if you rescue it in time. We keep this going until the smooth pieces are so small all you can wrap is a candy bar – an excellent present, by the way, if it’s something from Michel Cluizel.
As a gardener whose life is nurtured by, centered in , moored to the earth and the passing upon it of the seasons, I have to say all this flapdoodle over the name of the evergreen in the living room really rankles my curd. Here’s what: it’s a holiday tree; the holiday is the winter solstice; and people have been celebrating it with these trees for more millennia than Christianity can claim.
The decorated holiday tree is a symbol of life in the midst of darkness that belongs to everybody, atheists included. The only people who might reasonably claim it has been hijacked are Druids – and at least so far most of them have had the good sense to just keep quiet and eat cookies ( another aspect of the celebration that is WAY older than certain religions).
‘nough said. And since by now you probably have your tree if you’re planning to have one, I will say only don’t forget to keep it watered, to minimize the risk of fire and to make sure it smells good for as long as possible.
THE COOKIE PART – SHORTBREAD DIVISION
Shortbread is “cookie” reduced to the absolute basics, you can’t get any closer to eating sweetened butter unless you do it with a spoon. And recipes don’t get much easier, either. This one spends a lot of words on the fine points , but the bottom line is a short ingredient list and about 5 minutes of work.
Because the ideal texture is extremely tender and crumbly, recipes typically call for mixing all purpose flour with something like cornstarch or rice flour to lower the overall gluten content. It’s easier to just use cake flour, which every baker should keep a supply of for just these occasions. (The good side of its being devoid of any meaningful nutrient content is that it keeps forever).
For about 40 cookies, depending on how you shape them:
½ pound butter – freshness is more important than either salt or fat-content
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¼ teaspoon salt or a pinch more for unsalted butter
2 ½ – 3 cups cake flour ( amount needed will vary with the moisture content of the butter, the way you measure, and how rigid you want the finished cookies to be. The less you can get away with, the better – within reason, of course. )
ok,
1. Take the butter out of the fridge and let it soften until it is claylike, neither slump-squishy nor hard.
2. Put the sugars, salt and a few tablespoons of the flour in a processor fitted with the metal blade. Process until you don’t hear any brown sugar lumps. Add enough more flour bring the total up to 2 ½ cups. Give it another whirl or two.
3. Cut the butter into 8 or 10 pieces, scatter them over the flour, then pulse until the dough forms large clots and is just about to make a ball. This is lots of pulses.
4. Let the dough sit in a cool but not cold place for at least half an hour, up to half a day ( remove from processor and wrap in plastic if opting for the latter).
5. When ready to bake, heat the oven to 325. Roll about a tablespoon of dough into a ball, then lightly flatten it into a cookie. Put it on a piece of foil; put the foil in the center of a small, flat pan ( bottom of a pie tin works fine) and put it in to bake. Check after 6 or 7 minutes. It won’t be done yet, but it will have done enough of what it’s going to do so you will know whether to knead in more flour. Do so if necessary – freestanding shapes often need a bit more to avoid puddlehood.
6. Shape the dough (see below) on an ungreased cookie sheet, preferably the double kind with the air-layer in the middle. Bake until the shortbread is pale gold clear through , 15 minutes for pressed cookies, 20 to 30 minutes for classic wedges or little molds. Do not underbake; if it looks like the edges are browning too fast, just turn down the heat.
SHAPING SHORTBREAD DOUGH
Classic: Gently roll into balls the size of tennis balls. Flatten into circles a bit more than ¼ inch thick in the center, slightly thicker at the edges ( they get more heat). Circles should be about 5 to 6 inches in diameter. Use floured fork tines to punch into 8 wedges, then punch the center of each wedge. Leave everything attached. After baking, repunch wedges while the cookies are still hot, then separate when cold.
Molded: This is a good dough to use in the tiny fluted metal cups – about 1 inch across the top – intended for candies and Swedish sandbakkelsen. Roll teaspoon size pinches of dough into balls, put ’em in the ungreased cups, then go back and press down in the center with your thumb. Dough should come about ¾ of the way up the sides. ( It will smooth out in the baking but still be a bit dimpled.) Be sure to let them cool completely before trying to unmold. Serve as is or put a dollop of tart jam or chocolate ganache in the dimples.
Pressed: Standard advice for pressed cookies is to use a cold sheet and warm dough. With these, it works better to have both items at room temperature. If you can’t get the pressed shapes to stick, use the star opening and make rings.
(Shortbread-Molded: fancy cookware stores sell clay shortbread molds with elaborate patterns. For best results, use the recipes that come with them. )
