Simple Shortbread Cookies

I see too much of the online recipes that are full of pointless bull you just don't need so I'm going to start adding my simple, cheap recipes that anyone can do. The first one is a very basic cookie recipe that your kids will love.

What do you need?

Mixing Bowl - quite a large one but I used an old pyrex dish for a while. You can also get very cheap plastic bowls from discount stores.
Wooden Spoon - Nah, you're using your hands! It gets messy, perfect for the kids to join in with.
Some extra bowls - just makes it easier to move things around.
Kitchen scales - you need to weigh things.
Small cup - this is used for cutting our your biscuit shapes (use bakery cutters if you want or whatever shape you like)
Non-Stick Oven tray - I use round cake trays, does the same job.
Rolling Pin -

Ingredients

325g Plain Flour
200g Butter (I use low fat margerine)
125g Golden Caster Sugar
2 Tea Spoons (tsp) of Vanilla Essence
2 Egg Yolks - if you're not sure how to get egg yolks check out Youtube, it's a simple but messy procedure!)

Put the flour and butter into the bowl, mix it with your hands until you get a crumbly mix. Add the egg yolks, caster sugar and the vanilla essence. Now it gets really messy; some suggest using a mixer if you have one, great, if not get your hands in there. This mix will stick to your hands like mad; a light dusting of flour on your hands will solve the sticking though.

Once you have a dough you can start breaking large lumps off and rolling them out. Flour the surface you're rolling out on, also add some flour to the top and bottom of the dough ball. Start rolling until you get a flap pancake around half a centimetre thick; thn using your small cup start cutting out the shapes; place each shape onto your baking tray.

Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 4 (180 deg/350 Fah). Place all your cookies/biscuits into the over on the top shelf. Leave them for around 15 minutes, but keep checking on them. Once thy start looking light brown on the top get them out and control the urge to nibble on them (very hard I know!).

Optional Extras:

I like to add strawberry jam to the top of each biscuit and then add coloured sprinkles. You could also melt some chocolate and either dip the cookies in or coat them with the chocolate. These biscuits go well with pretty much anything and are simple to make.

As always make sure you wash your hands before you start.