Short and Sweet!

For Christmas, my friend from work gave me a peel-off calendar with a new recipe every day. Every day that passes I sort these recipes into two piles. Pile 1: The recipes that sound interesting and pile 2: the recipes that I would never bother cooking. Here we are in March, and I have yet to make one dish from pile 1, until today. Today's recipe was lemon shortbread. I've never made my own dough before and had all the ingredients so I figured "Why not!?"

Making this shortbread was very quick, but because it was my first time working with dough, I struggled a bit when combining the butter so my end result was more of a cookie. But it was still delicious!

I couldn't get over how great the lemon smelled as I was zesting and once added to the dough, the flavor was perfect! It was not over powering, but you could definitely taste it in every bite. The recipe mentioned that you could substitute lime or orange instead. I can't imagine how great an orange shortbread cookie would taste. YUM!

Recipe:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cups sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 1/2 tsp finely grated lemon peel
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 -inch cubes.

Directions:
1) Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Blend first 5 ingredients in processor. Add butter, cut in using on/off turns until moist clumps form.
2) Gather dough into ball; divide in half. Press 1 dough half onto bottom of each of two 8-inch diameter cake pans. Pierce dough all over with fork.
3) Bake until cooked through and pale golden, about 40 minutes. Cool shortbread in pans on racks for 5 minutes. Cute shortbread into 12 wedges. Cool completely. Using spatula, carefully transfer to platter.