Traditional Irish Shortbread Cookies Recipe | 5 Ingredient Recipes

Bold Bakers, because I'm Irish and in honor of St. Patrick's Day, I'm gonna show you how to make a traditional Irish shortbread. It is absolutely delicious and they are so adorable. They're very simple to make too. It's just five ingredients that I guarantee you, you already have in your own fridge and cupboard right now. So we're gonna start out by creaming together our butter. The butter has to be softened at room temperature. What I like to do is I leave it out overnight to make sure that it's really nice and soft. The beauty of being in Ireland is that we have the most amazing dairy. We've got great cream, great milk and great butter. And the reason is, is because it rains non-stop in the country and we have green grass all year round and green grass makes for happy cows. The butter is richer, it's darker, it just has a very unique flavor. I love to use Kerrygold when I can. And personally when I bake, I always use salted butter because it just adds a little bit more flavor and that's up to you. But like I really do recommend it, especially for a simple cookie like this that doesn't have a ton of ingredients. There's our butter and then we're gonna add in our sugar and we're gonna want to cream these two ingredients on high speed for around four to five minutes until it's really lovely and soft. Some shortbread cookies like, you'd often see a traditional Scottish shortbread, which is very similar. Sometimes they contain oats where you'll rub in the butter into the flour. This is different, it's a creaming method. So I'm from County Wexford, which is kind of what they call down the country. A lot of agriculture, a lot of green fields, a lot of tractors going down the road, you know, sheep crossing and lovely, big lovely fields all around where my mom lives. For those of you who have never been to Ireland, put it on your bucket list, you will not regret it. It's a absolute must for everybody. Into our sugar and our butter, we're gonna add in our vanilla extract in there. Good quality vanilla extract. Like I said, these cookies are just a few ingredients. So you want to make sure that everything going in there really counts. Beautiful. Wild Ash is creaming. I'm gonna do a very old school thing in honor of some Irish baking. When I was young, I started baking when I was probably around like six years old. In the recipes I used to make, often they were British and Irish and they always said sift your flour, sift your ingredients, bloop bloop bloop bloop. Kind of like the way when you hear an older person talking when you were young. And I always did it because that's what the book said. So I'm sifting together my flour and my salt. This is just regular all-purpose flour. The benefit of sifting is that it incorporates air and it will make for a lighter cookie. And one of the beautiful things about Irish Shortbread is that it is a very delicate, like melt-in-your-mouth light cookie. Biscuit, I should say, biscuit. So sift that flour. Over the years I've gotten very lazy and I stopped sifting. Now when I was growing up and used to make this recipe, I actually did it with an electric hand mixer or you can even do it by hand. So you don't need a stand mixer to do this one. This is looking good. I want to show you to cream something. It's to look like this. Often online I'll see stuff that's under creamed. In Ireland it's a method we use a lot. So I've been doing it since I was very young. So you want to make sure that it is nicely creamed. And then into this, we're going to add in our flour. And just turn it back on the machine. Just on low. And we just want to incorporate that flour. That's all we're trying to do. We're not beating it in, we're just incorporating. So I grew up in the 80s in Ireland, which was a very different time. And there was five kids in my family and there was, you know, there was a lot. My mom cooked every meal from scratch. She cooked every single day and there was always something cooking or being baked. And definitely my love for food and my passion came from my mom because she was such a silly as such an amazing cook and a baker. She was incredible. You know, and I thought like everybody's mom cooks like this. Everybody makes their own homemade pastries and then makes tarts and chicken pies from scratch and all this sort of stuff. She really was amazing considering she had a pack to feed of hungry children. My dad came from the wine world. So you know, now as a grown up, I have, you know, appreciation for like a really great food and great, you know, wine. So that was something that, a little something I got from both of them. Fusion wine was big in my house growing up. Now there is our cookie dough. It came together. It doesn't take long. We're just going to turn this out onto our countertop. It makes a good bit of cookies. The one thing about this dough, and I do this quite a lot, I'll make it and I'll freeze it and it freezes beautifully. You can even cut your cookies and freeze them like that either to make it easier. What we're going to do now is that because it is soft right now and it benefits from chilling, I'm going to wrap it up, squishy it into a disk, wrap it up nice and tight. So now what you're going to want to do is chill it for a minimum of 60 minutes. Cookie dough always benefits from being chilled. It'll be easier to work with later. You can leave in your fridge up to three days and like I said, you can also freeze it. So my dough has chilled. It is ready to go. Put some flour on your surface. This is a lovely dough to work with. Easy to move around and to manipulate. You want to roll your dough out to around quarter of an inch thick. I found that this was a nice thickness. Your cookie is supposed to be crumbly and have a bit of bite. This is not supposed to be a very thin cookie. I keep on saying cookie, but it's a biscuit. The difference is we don't have cookies in Ireland. We have biscuits and they tend to be just like this around the drier side. They go great with a cup of tea. They're kind of good for dunking. Cookies are something that I just think of when I think of America, I think like, "Oh, American cookies." You know, like a chocolate chip cookie that's gooey and soft. Those are not the kind of cookies that I grew up with. So you want your dough to be around quarter of an inch thick. So you always have your ruler and just check quarter of an inch. So I've got this really cute Irish stamp online. I'm going to put a link on BiggerBolderBaking.com where the recipe is where you can get this. And it's called Fun Food Tools and it's really sweet and it just makes all the difference. Because otherwise they were just going to be round cookies. So this is way more interesting. Now it's going to go around and stamp. And then after that you go with a 2.5 inch cutter and cut out around the outside. Stamp them nice and close. Make sure you put a lot of pressure. There you go. That one was better than my first one. So this dough will make around 30 cookies. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, well there's two things. You know, what do I miss the most about Ireland? And first I miss my mom. My mom is still there in my family. Some of my family. And then I miss the food. The food, you know, is, food and iron is amazing. You know, and even if it's kind of simple and you know like our sausage rolls and our summer potatoes and our Wexford strawberries. I mean it's incredible. And I do go home once every year roughly. Sometimes I used to go home a lot. And then last summer all of my family came from all over the world. My brother from Brooklyn with his family. My sister from Australia with her family. And my other sister from Galway. And then I have a sister in Wexford where I'm from. And we were all there. And there was five children under five. Which got a bit hectic. But it was really fun. You know, summer's in Ireland. You know, it was July, August. The days are really long. The weather is nice. The granny is in Ireland. All these good things. So later on I'm going to continue to cut out and re-roll that dough and get as many cookies as I can. Right now I'm going to get these into the oven so you can see what they look like. The last thing we do with Irish shortbread is you sprinkle over a little bit of what we would call caster sugar. In America it's granulated sugar. It's just a, you know, your regular coffee sugar is quite fine in America so we use that. That just adds a little bit of a crunch on the top. It's just, you know, always when you see a piece of Irish shortbread it has that thin layer of granulated sugar on top. Beautiful. Oh my gosh. I think these are so gorgeous. I can't wait to see when they're baked. Okay, that's it. No more dilly dallian. Into the oven. Bake your shortbread cookies at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, 160 degrees Celsius for roughly 18 to 20 minutes. You want a really light golden brown. Freshly baked Irish bread shortbread is the perfect reason to boil the kettle, make a pot of tea, dress the table, sit down, have a cookie and a yarn. These are absolutely gorgeous. Quintessential Irish. I just adore the beautiful Celtic knot around the edge. As you can see they are lightly browned, which is exactly how you should have them. And remember these were made with just five simple ingredients. Once you break these cookies you see how crumbly and buttery they really are. Butter brings us together in Ireland for a good time, a good story and good crack. And these biscuits will do just that. I will leave you with this. There's a saying in Ireland, "But butter and whiskey will not cure, there is no cure for." And that being said, lá féile pádrík. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Enjoy these cookies and I'll see you back here again really soon.