The Great Macadamia Shortbread Experiment

I love shortbread :-). I also love macadamias :-). And they are commonly combined to make macadamia-flavoured shortbread. So, you wouldn't think it'd be too difficult to make, right? I have been using the same shortbread recipe for the last few years. I got it from a cookbook titled *Comfort Food.* It's a good and simple recipe, consisting of only butter, caster sugar, plain flour, rice flour, and salt, producing lovely crumbly and butter biscuits cut into hearts, stars, bears, hands, rabbits and christmas trees/arrowheads. But you know...sometimes you just want a little more.

So today I endeavoured to change my recipe to include macadamias. I purchased 100g of unroasted nuts from the supermarket and put them in the food processor to crush. And it kinda worked. I ended up with something that looked a lot more like almond meal with some pieces that were a bit larger. Those last pieces for some reaons would just dance on top of the blades instead of being broken up like the other good nuts. No matter, its just something different, I told myself.

I then proceded to go about the rest of the recipe and method, adding in half a cup of the macadamia meal...and met my first big problem. Ideally, I should have adjusted the level of butter to accomodate the increased volume of dry ingredients. Because I hadn't the mixture was a bit crumblier than normal. This resulted in difficulty combining the whole thing into malleable dough. Why didn't you just throw in more butter? I hear you ask. Shortbread requires the butter to be creamed into the sugar creating an aerated mixture. The air bubbles then create a delicate and light texture. So, I would also need to have change the amounts of sugar used too.

Anyway, I managed to get the dough into some ball-y shapes and put them in the fridge to solidify a bit before cutting into cute shapes. By the time I came back from my errands, the balls were hard like rocks. Ugh. I tried rubbing them with my hands to make it into something vaguely roll-able but with a bit of pressure the ball just crumbled into giant halves. With a sigh, I started again kneading the crumbs together to form some semblance of dough and this time, cut the shapes straight from the warmed dough. This was also quite difficult as cutting it would make the edges of the dough crumble up meaning I could only cut about 2 or 3 shapes max. from each time I rolled it out. Eventually I got it all done. Yay. Adjusted the heat to accommodate for my crappy oven (although the first batch still burned).

Verdict: Well...the cookies are still quite sweet although understandably more crumbly than the standard one. Unless I get a cookie that has one of the larger lumps of macadamia, I can't seem to taste the nuts which is a pity. This batch will handed out to gauge ppl's reactions but I'll probably have to adjust the recipe to account for the addition of the nuts, whats the best size to cut the macadamias, and of course butter and sugar levels. Overall, I don't think theyre that bad - maybe a B-/C+ - good but not outstanding.