Hungarian Shortbread-TWD Baking with Julia

Hungarian Shortbread-that sounded interesting,especially to me with my mixed European Heritage.  Honestly I can't say which countries my relatives came from. My one grandfather had altered his name and told us he was from a small village in Lithuania and yet what little of his documents we could locate, showed St. Petersburg , Russia !  The other grandfather fled the Yugoslavian army,changed his name and we think stowed away on one of the ships out of Belgium. It's all a mystery as anyone who might have known something about either of my grandfathers is long gone. So I chuckled when I saw this recipe.  I thought immediately-shortbread,ahh those lovely buttery cookies. But what a surprise as I read the directions and ingredients, I thought hmm,pastry masquerading itself as shortbread-was it hiding from something like my grandfathers?  I wasn't sure about it,especially the "freeze the dough and grate it " part !  But let me tell you, this dough was so buttery and tasty, I'm thinking of trying shortbread cookie dough ice cream.  I'm not usually a raw dough fan but I had to hurry and put this in the oven before I taste tested all of the dough .

According to About.com "Hungarian shortbread or omlos teasutemeny (oom-loosh TAY-ahsh-soo-teh-men-ee), where omlos means short pastry and teasutemeny means biscuit in the cookie sense, has a thin layer of jam between two layers of buttery dough."  I used my best and sweetest butter, Kerrygold Irish Butter, for this.Whenever I make shortbread I always try to use Kerrygold-it gives a much richer and sweeter taste.But, I made a huge error as I was setting up my mise en place. The recipe calls for 4 cups of all purpose flour- I only had 1 cup left-how could that happen ? So I improvised, I added 2 cups of all purpose bread flour and 1 cup of cake flour-hoping the low gluten content in the cake flour would balance out the high gluten in the bread flour. And it did. I was worried that the shortbread would be too doughy and tough from the bread flour but the baking gods were with me and it turned out perfectly.

This is very rich, and I think it would be just as rich regardless of the type of butter used.  It's delicious,buttery and sweet.  I didn't make my own jam but instead used my favorite Bonne Maman Cherry Preserves. The tart cherries set off the buttery dough to perfection. You can see what my fellow bakers did with this recipe by clicking here.

And thanks to Lynette from 1Small Kitchen and Cher from The not so exciting adventures of a dabbler for hosting this week. Now go buy the book and start baking with us .