Rich, Buttery Shortbread Cookies

Hi, I'm Heather Bertinetti for eHow.com. We're going to make some awesome shortbread cookies today. So here I have my butter and a stand up mixer. I'm going to drop my butter in first, followed by my 10X sugar or powdered sugar. So now with the paddle attachment, we're going to cream these two together. Start at the lowest speed and then I can turn it up. So next I have some vanilla extract. I'm going to throw that in as well. Now while this is mixing we're going to split a vanilla bean. I love putting the vanilla bean in this recipe because I like to see the little specks and it just gives it such an awesome flavor. We're going to split it lengthwise and using the back of our knife, we're going to run it down the pod, scrape all those beans out and drop that in, perfect. Next I'm going to add my flour slowly and there's a lot of fat in this recipe to begin with. There's a lot of butter as opposed to flour and other ingredients and so because the butter flavor can be so overpowering, I like to cut it with a little bit of creme fresh and it has a nice acidity to it. So I'm going to add my baking powder and my salt, wait for this to come together and lastly my creme fresh. And that's it. So now we're going to wrap this up and we're going to refrigerate it. So now I want to show you how to roll the dough out. I've made this earlier and it's properly chilled. So we'll release it from the plastic, throw some flour down, just all purpose flour on our counter and if it's too cold, give it a little bit of a push. Now once again with the rolling pin, starting from the center, working out and start to roll. Now the thing with shortbread cookies is they don't puff up as much as other cookie doughs so you want to roll these out fairly thick, about half an inch as opposed to a quarter of an inch. You're going to turn, a little more flour if it starts to stick. You can see all those vanilla bean specs in there. That's exactly what we're looking for. So what I like to do, kind of press the sides in a little bit just to make sure it's all the same height and completely even and give it another once over, perfect. So now we're going to cut it, using a large chef's knife I like to do mine in little sticks, shortbread sticks. So I just kind of eyeball it a little bit and what I do is I'm going to take my circle, I'm going to cut it in half and square it off. You can save the rest of the dough for later use and reroll it later and now straight down from the top to the bottom using my two fingers almost as a guideline, nice uniform shortbread sticks. So I'm going to grab a sheet pan and piece of parchment paper and each one of my shortbread sticks are going to get rolled in some white granulated sugar and then place it on the tray and we'll bake them. Remember to space them out about two inches apart from each other. So now these are going to go in the oven at 325 degrees for about five to ten minutes. So our shortbread cookies just came out of the oven about 15 minutes ago and they're completely cooled. See the nice light golden brown color and the sandiness of the sugar. That's exactly what we're looking for and so I just like to plate them sort of like a crosshatch almost on top of the plate. Now these are a great snack. They're delicious with a cup of coffee and they're just reminding me of childhood right now and I have to take a bite. Delicious. I'm Heather Bertinetti. Catch me again next time on eHow.com.