Whipped Shortbread Cookies – A Christmas Essential!

Get ready for the holiday season with whipped shortbread cookies. Learn how to make these delicious treats from scratch. These delicious, melt-in-the-mouth whipped shortbread cookies are topped with little dollops of frosting and a tiny glace cherry. They’re super easy to make, too.

One of my favourite things about this time of year, besides the twinkling Christmas lights illuminating the long, dark nights, is all the festive baking: Christmas cakes, mincemeat tarts, the smell of wafting cinnamon, ginger, and cloves… and shortbread cookies!

Where did shortbread originate?

Shortbread, a popular Christmas and Hogmanay treat, is considered to have originated in Scotland. It was widely made as far back as the 12th century. However, the earliest written recipe dates back to 1736 and Mrs McLintoch’s Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-work. This cookery book was, incidentally, Scotland’s first published recipe book!

Here’s an 18th-century recipe credited to Mrs Frazer and her recipe book The Practice of Cookery: Pastry, Confectionary, Pickling, Preserving & C.

Take a peck of flour…beat and sift a pound of sugar; take orange-peel, citron, and blanched almonds, of each half a pound, cut in pretty long thin pieces: mix these well in the flour; then make a hole in the middle of the flour, put in three table-spoons of good yeast; then work it up, but not too much…roll out; prickle them on top, pinch them neat round the edges, and strew sugar, carraways, peel, and citron, on the top. Fire it…in a moderate oven.

Mrs Frazer

It is thought that Scottish shortbread was derived from a twice-baked medieval yeasted biscuit bread flavoured with spices and dusted with sugar. Mary Queen of Scots refined the recipe, possibly using French food inspiration to create the triangular petticoat tail shortbread shapes we now love.

What is in Scottish shortbread?

Traditional Scottish shortbread contains just three ingredients: butter, flour, and sugar, in a ratio of two parts butter, one part sugar, and three parts plain flour. This mixture is either formed into a large circle, which is baked, then cut into triangular shapes, into individual round biscuits, or into a large 2 cm thick slab, which is then cut into shortbread fingers. The biscuits are usually marked with the tines of a fork before baking.

Canadian nostalgia

The recipe I’ve shared here is not a traditional Scottish shortbread recipe. Rather, it originates from my Canadian childhood, where the older ladies in the village made it to share with friends and family at church socials and get-togethers.

It was my favourite Christmas cookie, the creamy, smooth, buttery biscuit topped with a tiny dollop of sweet frosting and a decorative piece of glace cherry—in both green and red for variety.

Christmas, for me, starts when a batch of these cookies has been made.

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