Feb 02 2010
Chocolate swirl shortbread on the second attempt
Last week we were expecting a visit from our ex-neighbours, who have just sold the flat opposite ours and moved elsewhere with a new baby. Right, I thought, we need some nice home-made biccies! I tried making Scrummy Chocolate Swirl Shortbread from Green & Black’s Chocolate Recipes but it failed miserably.
I tried again this week, because I still had many of the ingredients prepped — I had roughly chopped 100g of dark chocolate and cut some greaseproof paper to size and, well, I wasn’t going to be defeated by shortbread. Using Delia’s methods for the shortbread and the original recipe’s method for everything else worked quite well:
It’s basically just two colours of shortbread, one made plain and the other using a bit of cocoa instead of part of the flour. You lie one on the other, sprinkle the inside with shards of chocolate and roll it like a swiss roll before slicing.
In future I would try for a tighter coil and smaller chunks of chocolate. In fact, chocolate chip-sized lumps wouldn’t be too small, and would make it easier to roll the dough and cut it too. I would also try to bake them longer. I went over the allotted time but they’re still a wee bit blond and slightly chewy in the middle.
I agree regarding the size of choccy bits. Means the chocolate hit is just a little too concentrated in the centre- a degree more distribution would be good.
My impression is that the sizings given for chopping things in that book are a bit awry. I made the brazil nut chocolate chip cookies and chopped the brazil nuts, to my mind, as the recipe required. I then tried to roll the biscuit mix out to the stipulated thickness. But the nuts were too big! It simply wasn’t possible to roll thin enough with great clods of brazil nut sticking up.
I almost said something to this effect to you when I saw your chopped chocolate but a)I didn’t want to interfere (and in any case I hadn’t read the recipe) and b)I supposed that this time the recipe might have been right. I was wrong, clearly!
Also dougal somewhere forgets to mention that these are nevertheless blimen gorgeous!
Mmmmmm I love shortbread! I have never tried it with cocoa, but it is never too late!
it’s good! although I reckon the chocolate bits through the middle are pretty crucial too :o)
I make them with Maya gold chopped up into tiny chunks, and rather than roll out the chocolate dough I just flatten it then squish it out on the rolled-out plain dough using my fingers. It works much better that way. Then once it’s rolled I wrap it tightly in greaseproof paper and pop it back in the fridge for a good hour – it means it slices so much easier and looks better too.
And yes they are blimmin gorgeous! :D well worth persevering with, I had issues at first but by tweaking as above it’s now my standby easy recipe.