Making Irish Shortbread with a 7-Year-Old! | The Bigger Bolder Baking Cookbook

3,2,1… oh man! Hi Bold Bakers! My Bigger Bolder Baking cookbook is all about helping anyone to bake with confidence anytime anywhere. This is why I have Charlotte, my Bold Baking sous chef. And we are going to make, Charlotte… what are we gonna make? We’re gonna make a recipe from my cookbook so this is an exclusive recipe from my book. Do you wanna tell them what we’re gonna make? Yeah it’s Irish Shortbread. Bigger Bolder Irish Shortbread. So this is a recipe that I grew up on in Ireland, it's a really really lovely buttery cookie. And you said you love shortbread right? I love shortbread. Charlotte loves shortbread. So that’s why when we went through the book this is the one we stuck with. This is from chapter one and chapter one from the book is, do you remember what it is? It is Bowl and Wooden Spoon. There you go, good girl. And that chapter is the first chapter so it’s really great actually for little hands, or maybe you don’t use machinery or anything like that. There are lots of cookies in that chapter and there are some crumbles and crisps and things like that, so you can really make an array of desserts without having to use a machine. Yeah. That’s good. So the first step Charlotte is to… preheat the oven to 300 Fahrenheit or 150 degrees Celsius. So the good thing about this recipe is it can be made in a traditional oven, or what we’re gonna do today is make it in a toaster oven. Loads of people don’t have big ovens and they maybe only have toaster ovens and I don’t know if you know this but my kitchen, Charlotte knows, my kitchen's very really small, isn't it Charlotte? Isn’t it smaller in real life than it looks like on TV? So small. So small. Is that a good toaster oven Charlotte? Yeah. Is it dirty? Go down to this one, number two. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until pale, light and fluffy. Perfect, now our butter here, do you see that word? It’s really important. Softened, that’s right softened it’s really important. When it’s written in a recipe to use softened butter, you have to use softened butter. Yeah, it’s really important, it’s so important. It is important. See when you’re doing this by hand, Charlotte, you have to have the ingredients nice and soft to mix it, if it’s too hard you’re not going to be able to mix it by hand. Then what are you gonna do? Have to churn it. We’ll have to use a hand mixer or something. Okie dokie here’s what we’re gonna do I’m gonna add in the butter. And then I’m gonna get you to measure the sugar, how much do we need? We need a half a cup. Half a cup. So I’ve got a quarter of a cup here and I’m gonna do two of those. Lovely. Now, Charlotte, how strong are you? Show me your muscles. Those are good muscles I think they’re bigger than mine. So here’s what we’re gonna do we’ll share doing the mixing if that’s ok. So you start out, and what you have to do is cream the butter and the sugar and all that means is you have to mix these two together really well until they’re pale, light and fluffy. So there you go, and if you need to I’ll hold the bowl. So creaming is a very basic, actually one of the first baking methods you would learn. Something I learned as a kid because we would make a lot of cookies and buns, things like that. So we’d have to cream together the butter and the sugar. So the whole entire chapter, the first chapter is a lot like this, so it’s a great kind of introduction to baking, it’s a good way to kind of start out and then build-up towards the end where some of the desserts might be a little bit harder. That’s lovely Charlotte, ok I’ll give it a go now. Watch how strong I am. Man I’m so strong. Now you go. I really can. There you go. That looks pretty smooth. That’s perfect, good woman. You did awesome. So Charlotte what’s our next step? Add the flour and corn starch. Mix very lightly until you have a smooth dough. Gorgeous, I’ll give you that guy. I think I’ll be able to do that. If you want I’ll level it off to make it better, because you always level off your spoons when you’re baking. You don’t have to worry about getting flour on the floor because Kevin cleans up after me. Here I’ll make it dirtier. I didn’t say that, she did. In you go, lovely, one more. Gorgeous. Now how much of the corn starch? Corn starch? One cup. Just one cup. Just one cup. Do you know why we add cornstarch to our cookies? Why? Because it kind of makes them drier so it makes them really crispy. And there’s loads of butter so it’s a really buttery cookie and then it’s kind of dry and crumbly which is actually a really lovely texture to have in a cookie. So we’re gonna get a cup of corn starch. So let’s have a look Charlotte. Mixing. We’re on to mixing we added in our flour we added in our corn starch. So what we have to do now is, is it mix it together until you have a smooth dough. Do you think you’d be able to make this cookie by yourself ? Yeah. To be fair you kinda technically have I just stood here and handed you stuff. I know. So for all the recipes in the book I give a little anecdote or story on where the recipe came from and what it means to me. Shortbread was something my sister used to mak. Lots of the kids in my family used to make different things. I remember George would make profiteroles, Suzanne made chocolate cake and CarolAnn used to always make shortbread. And it was very very similar to this and it’s really easy, a really great recipe for kids, it’s only a few ingredients and you can do it all by hand. You’re doing good, Charlotte. Will I do a little mix? Get in the bowl! There you go do you see how it’s starting to come together? Do you see now why I said softened butter? Yeah. Yeah it’s really important. This is crumbly dough, yeah this is starting to come together, yeah. Perfect I think you did great, this is looking lovely it all kind of came together. So now all we have to do is push it into our baking tin. So Charlotte it says in the recipe we need an 8 by 8 tin and that’s what this guy is. It’s the perfect size and it makes nice thick shortbread. You want to see my trick for buttering? When you have butter wrappers, you grease your tin with the wrapper. And then you can now put it in the bin and you’ve got a greased pan. Wow. Genius, huh? Genius. Instead of just taking a stick of butter and just. Exactly, yeah. I came up with that, I invented that. Don’t ask anyone else but I did. There we go. And then we’re gonna line it with parchment. What is our next step, where are we at? We’re at four. Press the dough into a pre-papered pan. Ok lovely, Charlotte if you wouldn’t mind get the dough into the pan there. Lovely, you’re doing good. Good job. So Charlotte do you mind getting your hands dirty? No I like mixing, I’m gonna get you to put your hands in there and form it into the tin. Then we’re gonna cut it into sticks after? Yeah. Always thinking one step ahead Charlotte. There’s a buttery… you can just smush that back in there it’s ok. Okie dokie. Nothing saw nothing. Nothing saw nothing. So what I’m gonna do is cut it into fingers, so what you want to do is just kind of make an indent, and you can imagine as it bakes, it’s already gonna have, we call this scoring, it’ll already have these lines in there so it’ll make it much easier to cut your final shortbread. And what I’m gonna get you to do because I think you’re gonna be good at this job, is... Oh, prick the holes in? Prick the holes in the shortbread. Gorgeous Charlotte that’s great. All done. So check that out, Bigger Bolder Irish shortbread that Charlotte made. Basically, but I helped, I helped. Remember me helping? So we’re gonna pop this in the oven now. You wanna bake your shortbread enough so it’s a lovely light golden brown on top. Charlotte our job is done for now, let’s go take a break. Ta dah! Wow look how gorgeous that looks. Do you notice that it kind of puffed up a bit? And if you push down on it, it’s kind of firm underneath your finger. Nice? I’m just licking the crumbs. I’m just licking the crumbs. Charlotte in a word, what does it smell like in this kitchen right now. Baked butter!Baked butter, that’s exactly what it smells like. You see the way our lines stayed? So you can imagine that a cookie that’s half butter is just gonna be absolutely delicious. Look at that, yeah, isn’t that gorgeous? That looks so great. So Charlotte how do you think we did? Does it look like the picture in the book? Gorgeous, let’s see on the other side. Yep. Just like it, you wanna try a little bit? Yeah. That’s good. It’s good, huh? Just a tiny bit sweet, but all in all good, yeah it’s very good. Very crumbly, also very soft, soft though and crispy. But it’s really good, yeah its crispy on the outside and soft in the middle because of all that yummy butter. It’s a pretty easy cookie to make with just like 4 ingredients. If I come to your house one day will you make this for me? So as you can see this is just one recipe that anyone can make anytime, anywhere and I’ve got over 100 more in my cookbook. It’s Charlotte approved, right Charlotte? I love it! Thanks would you buy my cookbook? Aw thank you. Say goodbye now to everyone Charlotte. Bye!