Originally published by The Clifton Courier, July 3, 2019

The other day I was tasked with contributing something to an afternoon tea and I decided that, after seeing it during my social media scrolling, I wanted to try baking savoury shortbread. It has everything I love – high butter content, rosemary and salt. Perfection.

I found a recipe from a stylish-sounding lady called Sue Moran who suggests using these bickies instead of place cards at themed brunches in a post on a website called View From Great Island.

I could have just followed the recipe as it was, but we all know that I like to make things about me, so I decided to make enough tweaks to the shortbread so that I could take more credit for the buttery creations. I could pretend that I had basically invented a new recipe by lazily swapping the flour and adding a few extra herbs.

The original recipe called for one-and-a-quarter cups of flour but, because I’m a millennial with a complicated relationship with food, I decided to use a healthier flour. I went into the supermarket to select my superior form of powdered carb, tossing up between wholemeal flour and spelt flour. It was a tough call to make. It was the “ketchup or catsup?” scene from The Simpsons all over again. I wanted the crumbly, rustic texture of wholemeal flour, but I liked the trendiness spelt offered. In the end, I decided to go with both.

I used three quarters of a cup of spelt flour and half a cup of wholemeal flour.

I sieved them both separately because it seemed like the kind of thing a wholesome baker would do. The spelt flour, which was almost as fine as normal flour, had a few grainy bits at the end, but I thought they seemed like they would be good for my guts, so I forced them through the sieve. The wholemeal flour had even more husk than the spelt, but it looked super healthy and rustic and all kinds of wanky, so in that stuff went.

Next, I found a stalk of rosemary I’d swiped from a platter of wraps, where it was used as a tasteful garnish. I chopped the leaves finely but the recipe called for two tablespoons for herbage, so I went out to my pot plants for more. I grabbed a good bushy stalk of thyme and four sage leaves and their stems, because that’s all the sage I’ve been able to grow. According to my notes, I needed an extra half a tablespoon of dried rosemary to meet the two-tablespoon requirement. Then I chucked in a good crack of black pepper and two large pinches of Maldon salt, sprinkled dramatically into the mixing bowl.

I then added 115 grams of softened butter, chopped, and a whole bloody cupful of parmesan cheese, which seemed excessive to me but that’s what the recipe called for.

Our gal Sue wanted me to blitz this up into a food processor to make a dough but, in an extremely out-of-character move, I decided not to use my beloved food processor. I had a hankering for wholesomeness and that meant scrunching the butter into the flour like one would with scones.

Once I’d made a rough, crumbly dough I read that I should try adding half a teaspoon of water to get the mixture to come together.

But I decided to get a little reckless and veer from advice in front of me. In my notes I wrote “Fuck that, ADD GARLIC”. Buckle up everyone, we’re going off-road here.

I added a half a teaspoon of minced garlic to bring that gear together.

I know, it’s pretty unconventional. Garlic with parmesan and rosemary? Who thinks of that?!

However, after a wee bit of kneading, I realised that I actually did need that half teaspoon of water, which really made a difference.

It’s about this time I realised I needed to pre-heat the oven. The temperature was in Fahrenheit, so it roughly translated to 175 degrees. Honestly, I would say to go ya-self mate and up the heat to 180 degrees.

Then I rolled out the dough between two sheets of baking paper to prevent a mess. I also used a cold bottle of wine (yep, I like my reds cold; room-temperature wine makes me think of urine samples) from the fridge because I didn’t have a rolling pin. I like to think the cold wine does something good for the butter in the dough, but I don’t have the authority to make that claim. I then used a narrow drinking glass to cut the dough into circles, laid them on a tray and baked them for about 15 minutes.

But if you’re playing along at home, just watch for when they have tiny bit of browning on the sides, at which point you should yank them out, wack them on a rustic chopping board and Instagram accordingly.