For BakingSpiritsBright: Shortbread is very adaptable. I make several varieties for Christmas each year. I make chocolate chip, lemon, almond and new this year, cherry almond shortbread. I was going to make coconut shortbread this year but inspiration hit hard when I found the red candied cherries in my pantry. The cherry almond may be my new favorite. (I wonder how it would be if I added chocolate chips to that?) I have my Scottish grandmother's recipe which is very basic: 1 lb. butter (she always used salted butter), 1/2 cup caster (granulated, superfine preferred) sugar, 1/2 cup icing (confectioner's) sugar and enough flour to make it the right consistency (through trial and error I've found 5 cups works perfect). Even though Nana's written recipe didn't say this, I know she used rice flour for about 1 cup of the flour when she could get it to make a slightly crisper shortbread. Her recipe made 4 "cakes" rather than 2 and since I can fit 2 cakes per cookie sheet, I can get a lot done in a short amount of time. She also baked it in a "slow" oven for about an hour. On another topic, I used to have a whole collection of shortbread molds and used to identify the different varieties I made by the design of the mold. I stopped using them a while ago, however, because I found that the pieces you get by cutting with the design were pretty big. I also had sporadic trouble with the shortbread releasing cleanly and the design being clear, just like PJ and other posters. Now I just free form them into rounds on a cookie sheet, prick it all over with a fork and use the tines to decorate the edges. Some varieties are obvious, like the chocolate chip, but if they are not, I use different colored sugars to decorate the cakes before baking so I can tell which is plain and which is lemon, for example. Shortbread has to be my all time favorite cookie.

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