Make a piece of shortbread

Feel like a biscuit? This recipe will make exactly one tasty piece of shortbread.

Safety: Use clean hands and equipment. This activity requires a hot oven. Ask an adult for help.
First aid: If you burn yourself, run the burn under cold water for 20 minutes.

You will need

Ingredients

15 g butter, softened

10 mL caster sugar

0.3 mL vanilla extract

31 mL plain flour

8 mL rice flour

Extra butter to grease the baking tray

Extra flour for kneading

2mL caster sugar to sprinkle on top
Sift the dry ingredients.

Equipment

Baking tray
Bowl
Fork
Sieve or sifter
Spoon
Measuring tools – a pharmacy will sell medicine cups and other tools for measuring small quantities.

What to do

Preheat oven to 150°C and grease a baking tray.
Use a fork to beat the butter, sugar and vanilla together in a bowl, until they are pale and fluffy.
Sift the flours and mix them with the mixture, using a spoon. This is your shortbread dough.
Sprinkle some extra flour on the bench, and gently knead your shortbread dough until it is smooth.
Roll the shortbread dough into a layer about 8 mm thick and put it on the baking tray. Sprinkle with some extra sugar.
Ask an adult to help you put the shortbread in the oven for around 40 minutes or until it starts turning golden.

It takes a lot of work to make one piece of shortbread with this recipe. However, if you want to make more than one, you don’t need to make them one at a time. If you work out how many pieces you want, you can multiply the quantity of each ingredient and make a recipe for exactly the right number of biscuits for you. That way, you’ll only need to measure and mix once.

When you’re multiplying this recipe, you’ll have to be a bit careful. You need to multiply each of the ingredients, but you don’t need to multiply all the other numbers in the recipe. If you were making 10 pieces of shortbread, you wouldn’t need 10 bowls, and you certainly wouldn’t want to bake them at 1500°C. However, you might need a second baking tray, and the shortbread might take a few minutes longer to cook.

Real-life science

Food companies are very interested in scaling up recipes. When they come up with a new recipe, they first make it in small batches in a laboratory. If the recipe is promising, then they will scale it up to be made in their factory. Whenever a new recipe is scaled up, food scientists have to run tests. Sometimes when a recipe is scaled up, some costs increase a lot, and a recipe that looked good in the lab is too expensive to produce in the factory.

More information

An example of scaling up a cake recipe

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2 responses

Don

17 August, 2021

Why is the measurement of some solid ingredients (sugar, flour) in mL?

1. David
  
  17 August, 2021
  
  Hi Don,
  This activity was written in 2011, back when electronic scales were less common. Even now, many people don’t have scales that could measure, say 6 grams of rice flour, but measuring spoons or the measuring cups you use for cough syrup are pretty good for the task.
  If we were top do this activity again, we would probably include both volume and mass measurements

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