3-Ingredient Shortbread Cookies – Easiest Christmas Cookies

Buying holiday cookies? Forget it. These three ingredient shortbreads, are buttery, festive, and way better than store-bought. Hi Bold Bakers, I'm Gemma Stafford, professional chef and baker, and I've been making cookies all of my life. We'll whip up the dough in minutes, cut them into festive shapes, and bake until golden and crisp. So let's get baking and make this holiday season extra buttery and sweet. So let's make this really simple dough, just three ingredients. Now of course the star of the show here is butter. You want your butter to be softened out at room temperature, so I like to leave mine out for a few hours to be the perfect consistency. So as a very proud Irish woman and a chef, I choose Plouger Premium European Style Butter because it is 82% butter fat. It is slow-turned, has superior flavor, texture, consistent results. I choose salted for that little bit of extra flavor. I'd also like to thank Plouger for sponsoring this video and bringing it to you guys. After the butter, our second ingredient is powdered sugar, or what we call in Ireland, icing sugar. When making shortbread, you'll often see recipes using granulated sugar or powdered sugar like this. And the results are a little bit different. For this cookie, I like to use powdered sugar, so it's very smooth and what you get is just a really flaky cookie. Okay, so I'm going to use my electric hand mixer, however you can do this by hand using a wooden spoon and that will work totally fine. You want to cream this together on a high speed for around three minutes until it's light and fluffy and a little bit pale in color. So because this cookie is just three ingredients, you really want to use the best quality you can get your hands on. And Plouger butter is inspired by chefs and created for chefs just like me and is available for you guys, the home baker and aspiring chefs also. So the butter is a lovely consistency, nice and fluffy and creamed. We're going to add in our all-purpose flour and we're just going to mix that until our dough is formed. There you go, it comes together really fast just like that. So like I recommend with cookie doughs, it's always best to chill them. This is quite a soft dough because of the creamed butter. So we're going to wrap it in some cling wrap and pop it into the fridge. The beauty of this dough also is it can be kept in the fridge for up to around three days. It can also be put in the freezer for up to eight weeks. So when you're planning for the holidays and getting ready, this is the perfect go-to cookie. So once your dough is chilled and it's nice and firm, it is time to roll it out. So on a floured surface, so we're going to roll it out a quarter of an inch thick. So don't be afraid to put that flour on your surface to help you roll. It's a soft dough and it'll just make life easier. So you can see as I'm rolling here, the dough is really easy to roll out and that's because Plouger is slow churned, which makes for a really workable dough when you use it, which is perfect for pastries for dough making. And because of that high fat content, you've got less water in there, which means less shrinkage, which is really important when it comes to our pastries. And in case you missed it a few weeks ago, I used Plouger to make a creamed butter pastry and then I made that into a silk tar. So make sure you check out those videos. So once a quarter of an inch thick, get some lovely festive little cutters like I have here and cut out any shapes you want. Just make sure they're adorable. I have these super cute cutters that just take this shortbread cookie to the next level. And I'm pretty sure the designs will make it even more delicious because we eat with our eyes also being a pastry chef for over 20 years. I have a variety of cookie cutters. And now with a five year old, I have even more reason to have them. I also like to use these star cutters, which are also Christmasy. Well they're Christmasy if you make them Christmasy. And here's how I'm going to make them extra Christmasy. I'm going to pop it onto my tray. I'm going to put the cookie cutter back over it. And I'm going to just press in some holiday sprinkles into the dough. When these bake, they won't bleed, they'll just stay as they are. Get the sprinkles a good push in so they stay in their spot. While you're cutting out, if you feel like your dough is getting a little bit soft, then pop it back into the fridge and let it chill again. Star cut out, pop them onto your tray. So in Ireland during the holidays, shortbread is probably one of the most popular cookies I would say, often gifted in tins of cookies. And during the holiday season on biggerbolderbaking.com where this recipe is, this, cookies like shortbread are some of the most popular recipes for the whole season. This dough is versatile. I did three ingredients because I love the fact that you can make a cookie with just three ingredients. If you want to get a little bit fancy and add some vanilla bean paste in there, that would be lovely. Some citrus, some rind, or even like almond extract, whatever you like. It's a very versatile dough. For this cookie dough with your scraps, feel free to roll them out again and keep on cutting until all your dough is gone. The last ones I'm going to do is I'm going to cut out a few more stars. And then I'm going to put a little hole in the middle and later we're going to fill those with some jam. With the piping nozzle I go in and I just cut out that center part just on one side, just like that. And then later on we're going to sandwich them together. Perfect. Our cookies are looking great, very festive. Let's get them into the oven. Bigger cookies at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, 165 degrees Celsius for roughly around 20 minutes. You want a lovely light golden brown on these cookies. Look at these beautiful little cookies and the stamps turned out so great. Oh my gosh, I love them. So now sticking with a three ingredient cookie, we're going to add some things to embellish them a little bit. So like as you can see here we did our stars and look how they baked. You see the way the non-periels, they stayed where they were. This is gorgeous. They look really good. Over here I have some bits, I have some melted chocolate so you can take a star or any kind of cookie you want and dip it. You can have, you can do a drizzle just to give it a little kiss of chocolate. You can do white chocolate. I have bitter sweet here. You can also do milk, whatever you like. Shake off any excess chocolate and then just lay it down on some parchment until it sets hard. Now we're going to get extra fancy. Remember these ones that we cut out just here? Here's what we're going to do. Around the holidays you often see like a Linzer torte or a Linzer cookie, which are very delicious with jam and nuts and they're very yummy. Well we're going to kind of create that ourselves. I'm going to put some jam on the one side. I'm going to dust the other side with powdered sugar like so. I'm trying not to get my fingerprints on there. We're going to sandwich them together. You can decorate these cookies so many ways. Once you have them ready, what I like to do is put them into a holiday tin. In my tin I like to do an assortment of cookies. No one will believe that this cookie with three ingredients but you get all of these varieties of cookies. These cookies are fantastic for any of your holiday parties but also for gift giving and for shipping. Because they're a firm cookie they ship really well. And they stay fresh for a couple of days. Because of all that lovely butter these cookies are truly melt in your mouth and they will have your friends and family asking for them year round. If there's one thing Irish people know it is good shortbread and this is five star melt in your mouth. Perfect for the holidays. I want to say a big thank you to Plueger Butter for sponsoring this video and bringing it to you guys today. Happy holidays and I hope you have a lovely holiday season.