We make this family recipe only once a year, for Christmas.
Cookies are rich, “short” and delicious!
2012: Alas, I can’t make them this year (no oven!) but if I am lucky, a daughter will make them.
Ingredients
1 lb of butter
⅓ cup of lard
1¼ cup fruit or white sugar
about 4 cups of bread (regular) flour
¾ cup rice flour
Method
Cream softened butter and lard (do not use food processor; but a mixmaster is OK; I prefer to mix by hand)
Add sugar gradually
Add mixed flour
Mix and knead as bread
Roll out ⅓ ” thick
Cut with cookie cutters (bells, Christmas trees, wreaths) and decorate (coloured sugar, silver balls known as dragées or dragoons)
Bake at 350F for 8-10 minutes until very pale yellow.
Then hide them, or they will grow legs and walk away (two-legged “mice” in the cookie tin)
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It’s the lard and the rice flour that make these shortbreads really ‘short’ and tasting better than any shortbread you have ever eaten.
This recipe makes approx. 60 cookies, depending on the size of the cookies that you bake.
Unbaked dough can be refrigerated a few days, or may also be saved as a roll and frozen.
Just make sure that if it is chilled or frozen, you let it warm to room temperature before you roll out the dough.
A chilled roll may be sliced into cookies (similar to “refrigerator cookies.”) They will taste great, but won’t look as festive.
On the Boardwalk 