Un kurabiyesi, Sakine teyze's shortbread
This recipe started off a little wonky.
When we first tried it in early February, Fatma mis-remembered the sugar quantity that her longtime friend and neighbour Sakine had suggested she use. So, the first batch turned out like sugar cookies and made our teeth hurt and Granddad laughed a lot when he first tasted them. (RIP to that half kilo of icing sugar.)
But, perseverance is important when you’re trying to write down recipes that have been kept in the minds and hearts of the wise women who carried them here on their migration to Australia, and we were rewarded the following week. These beautiful, white-as-snow shortbread have a very delicate flavour and really benefit from using high-quality, fresh flour.
They are perfect with an afternoon coffee.
Ingredients
1 cup olive oil
1 cup icing sugar
3 cups high-quality plain flour, sifted
1 tsp cocoa powder, to decorate
Method
Preheat oven to 170 and line a baking sheet with baking paper.
Using your hands, combine the oil and sugar until smooth and the oil has lightened in colour. Add the flour and combine until the dough begins to tear away from itself.
Roll into walnut-sized balls and line them up on the sheet. They won’t expand much, so leaving only a couple of centimeters between each is ok.
To decorate the shortbread into little upside-down mushroom shapes, Fatma uses the cut-off top of a plastic bottle (cut at the neck of this diagram), dipped into some cocoa powder. Gently press the cocoa-dipped mouth of the bottle into the balls of dough about 1/3 of the way down.
Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the bottom of the shortbread have turned a slight golden colour. The biscuit should stay white.
To make a chocolate version of these, add 2 tbsp of cocoa powder to the mixture at the same time as the flour. Some varieties also dip the baked shortbread into chocolate and let it set. But I love the simplicity of these as they are.
This recipe makes around 30 little mushroom-shaped shortbread and can be kept in an air-tight container for a couple of weeks. Just make sure not to squash them when you store them, they are delicate and crumble easily. (But taste the same whatever misshapen mess you find them in.)
