Teacher's Pet Shortbread Cookies

Anyone who knows me, knows I am chronically disorganized. I consistently forget to charge my cell phone, misplace everything and always forget things that I'm suppose to do. Such is the case every end of school year when it comes time to give my daughter's teachers a little something thank you for resisting the urge to strap my child. Every year I mean to bake cookies but only end up remembering late the night before and rushing out to Jean Coutu to buy the last remaining $5-boxes of chocolates on the shelf. However considering there's roughly a dozen people I need to thank for their restaint, this adds up to being quite expensive. Again this year I forgot till the night before but decided to make them anyways and avoid the expense... it was early enough in the evening.


These are about the easiest cookies you can make, in terms of minimal number of ingredients.


Shortbread Cookies
1 lb unsalted butter (make sure it's unsalted!!)
1 cup fructose (fruit sugar)
4 cups white flour


Make sure the butter is still firm but not too hard to work with. Leaving it out for an hour or two usually does the trick. Cream the butter and sugar then add the 1 cup of flour at a time. This is the fun part where you can get your hands all gooey.

The worst part of making shortbread would have to be the time and trouble it takes to roll out the dough and carve it up with cookie-cutters, so we just decided to make little discs out of the dough. Er, well I tried to make little ones anyway.

Bake at 275 F for 20-25 minutes and transfer to another try for cooling.

We decided that to make them extra yummy we'd drizzle melted chocolate over them. Just throw a square or two of semi-sweet chocolate in the microwave, drizzle over them with a spoon and voila! Make sure to put them in the fridge so the chocolate can harden. (And for some reason these cookies taste so much better after they've been chilled).

Lastly—after a trip to the dollar store—we put them in bags, tied them with ribbon and added some little flowers to make our efforts extra pretty. 

The whole thing took under two hours and rang in at a cost of under $15. I hope they like them!