I haven't really made shortbread before. I know the theory. But my mom makes such good shortbread at Christmas-time, that I usually just enjoy hers, so I've never gotten much practice making my own.

It's a simple enough concept: use a 3:2:1 ratio of flour:butter:sugar by mass. Cream the butter and sugar together, mix in the flour, bake until delicious! You can add flavourings in if you want. Shape them. Decorate them. But the foundation is that 3:2:1 ratio.

I believe they are traditionally made with soft flour (aka plain/standard flour in the UK/NZ respectively). Which is usually sold as "cake & pastry" flour¹ here.
Most North American recipes (including my mom's) seem to use all-purpose flour mixed with cornstarch (cornflour). This is something I often see with North American versions of European recipes. If your flour is hard, cutting it with cornstarch will effectively "soften" it. So, you can still have the effect of using a soft flour without having to go out and buy a specialty ingredient. Which suits me just fine. Except I actually have a surplus of soft flour right now, so I decided to just omit the cornstarch this time and make my shortbread with cake flour.

Armed with that knowledge (and my soft flour), I was hoping that this would be a nice, easy dessert to pull off. Sadly, it didn't quite work out.
The flavour was nice enough!, but it didn't unmould cleanly and my cookie came apart when I tried to turn it out. I think I probably should have given it five more minutes in the oven and then let it cool for a little longer before trying to unmould it. I may also take the advice of using ~25% rice flour next time as well. It seems that a lot of bakers swear by it. I just didn't want to make too many changes all at once on my first attempt.

Lavender Shortbread

Adapted from Dessert of the Day by Kim Laidlaw

Ingredients

• 250g unsalted butter, softened
• 125g sugar
• 1-2 Tbsp. fresh or dried lavender
• 1/4 tsp. coarse sea salt (optional)
• 280g soft (plain/standard/cake) flour, sifted
• 90g rice flour

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F) and lightly oil a shortbread mould or 23cm (9") loose-bottom tart tin.
2. Cream the butter with the sugar.
3. Beat in the lavender and the salt (if using).
4. Add both types of flour and mix until fully combined.
5. Press the dough into the prepared mould.
6. Dock (prick) all over with a fork.
7. Bake at 180°C (350°F) on bottom oven rack for 50-60 minutes.
8. Allow to cool in mould/tin for at least 20 minutes.
9. Turn out onto cutting board.
10. Cut into wedges and allow to cool.

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¹ I see a lot of discussion online about how cake flour is different than pastry flour and pastry flour is actually closest to British "plain" flour and cake flour is even softer/lower-protein. But I've never actually seen that in the wild. We just get "all-purpose" and "cake & pastry". (Plus stuff like whole wheat, rye, spelt, rice, pasta/00, bread, etc.) But I have literally never seen "cake flour" as a separate and distinct thing from "pastry flour". Not saying that it doesn't exist! Just saying that it doesn't seem to exist here. So, for my purposes, I treat them as the same thing and roughly equivalent to what is sold as "plain" or "standard" flour in other parts of the world. ^Back