This one's for my Dad

Apparently my dad reads my blog. He called me the other day and made a request: he wanted me to make Lorna Doone Cookies. Since we're going to meet my parents in Branson this Sunday, I thought I'd give it a try.
A quick Google let me know that they're a type of shortbread cookie. I haven't had them in quite a while, so I decided to just find a shortbread recipe that looked good and see what I came up with. I decided on the simplest type of shortbread, which only has 3 ingredients: flour, sugar, and butter (but you could possibly count butter as 2 ingredients, since it calls for an entire pound of butter!). The only decision that I had to make was whether to use white or brown sugar. I thought that brown sugar would add a nice richness, so I gathered my ingredients:

I creamed 2 cups of butter with 1 cup packed brown sugar, scraping down the sides as necessary.


Next, I added 4 1/2 cups of flour, about 1 cup at a time, and beat until light and fluffy. At this point, I dumped about 1/3 of the mixture on some parchment paper and rolled to about 1/2 inch thickness. I cut the scraps away with a pizza cutter and cut the dough into about 1 by 3 inch rectangles.


I poked each rectangle with a fork,

and put them in the oven for about 20 minutes. At this point, they were almost done, but I could tell that they were going to stick together, so I used the pizza cutter again to re-cut the rectangles and put them back in the oven for 5 more minutes.

For my second batch, I thought I'd try separating the rectangles before baking. This was way more trouble than it was worth. I also differed the fork pattern, just for variety.


I was not quite as accurate with my sizing of the cookies on this batch. The little ones burned a little, and the big ones were slightly underdone.

I'm not sure if they're Lorna Doones ( I'll have to wait until dad tries them to see if they fit the bill), but they are really delicious!