Shortbread love

Happy Valentines day everybody! hope you have been spoilt and loved. 

if you havent been feeling much  love and feel that this is a commercialized  hoax of a holiday then..
make shortbread. comforting comfort food complete with almonds and chocolate. snuggle down with a good movie and mug of hot chocolate and enjoy. (scroll down for recipe)

having just been to cadbury world in birmingham, i have really had chocolate on the brain. i was practically living on it last week so naturally when i got home, the first thing to do was bake with it. i remember my friend Cally having a rather good shortbread recipe and i thought, shortbread goes well with chocolate,  it being valentines day and all, one thing led to another and these bites were born.

my gran makes very yummy shortbread cookies topped with a blob of chocolate and an almond, so i think i was also longing after those a bit when i made these

fill a piping bag with melted chocolate of your choice and drip it over your biscuits, its a lot of fun!

you can use more than one type of chocolate in more than one way to decorate these babies.

in this case i piped the dark chocolate hearts, let them harden and then piped the white chocolate on top

all packaged and ready to spread the love at work :)

Cally's famous Scottish shortbread:
Now, she does claim that you have to have Scottish blood in you to be able to make these properly. So the poor suckers who arent of scottish descent (myself included), i suppose shall just have to be content never being able to create scottish shortbread. i can live with that.

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar (probably better if you use castor sugar but anyways)
3 cups flour
whole blanched almonds (if using)

1) cream butter and sugar until fluffy
2) add 2 1/2 cups of flour and mix well. collect into a dough
3) use last 1/2 cup of flour to cover surface of counter.
4) roll out dough until about 1cm thick, cut out with cookie cutters.
5) press whole, blanched almonds into the centre of each cookies if using almonds
6) bake for 30min or until slightly brown but they should be as pale as possible.

to decorate:
melt chocolate of choice in the microwave or however you like to melt it. be careful not to burn it or get water in it.
pour it into piping bags that you have made or bought (or a plastic ziplock bag/sandwich bag works well for this). snip off the end or a corner of the bag to the thickness you want the chocolate stream to be. and drip all over your shortbread!
note: if you are using two kinds of chocolate like dark chocolate hearts with whits squiggles ontop then wait for your dark chocolate to harden before drizzling the white ontop.