A friend of mine sent me a text message two weeks ago: Hi dear, one of my students (she gives private Turkish courses) discovered your blog and baked “simit”. She said that she loved the blog and that the recipes were so easy to understand. I told her that I would tell you immediately, to make you happy.
And yes, I WAS happy!
And then she continued to tell me that she expects more Turkish recipes. Ever since I have been trying to bake or cook more from Turkish cuisine. And this recipe is one of them.
Ok, actually shortbread cookies are not exactly Turkish, you can find different versions in many different cultures. But this one I am giving the recipe of is the Turkish version.
I had made this cookie before with another (again Turkish) shortbread recipe and in that one you would cover the cookies with powdered sugar in the end, when they are freshly out of oven. You can, I guess, still do the same with these ones, but I wanted to keep them less heavily sweet and less messy.
I did not know before, but apparently my flatmate is crazy about shortbread cookies – she was really happy to hear that I was to bake them that morning. And this is why, in the end, she became the ultimate taster and, happily, she approved.
That evening and the next morning I packed them and put “My Dear Kitchen in Helsinki” labels o them (which were designed by my dear flatmate) and gave the cookies as a gift to the participants of Make{able} Workshops Arkadia Bookshop Edition in the next afternoon (you can get more information about these interesting sewing workshops at makeable4u.wordpress.com).
So here is a well approved shortbread cookies recipe. You will see that you do not need super hard to find ingredients, they are mostly things that are found in your kitchen regularly (if you are a rather regular baker).
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Ingredients:
250 gr. white flour
125 gr. powdered sugar
150 gr. butter (at room temperature)
1 tsp baking powder
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1. Preheat the oven to 100C.
2. Put flour, powdered sugar, baking powder and butter (cut into smaller pieces just to make it easier to deal with) in a bowl and start kneading.
3. Knead until you get a smooth and soft dough which does not stick to your hands.
4. Divide the dough into two pieces. Roll each piece by your hand to turn them into long pipes, about 2 cm in diameter.
5. Take a fork and draw lines all along the pipe. This is just for decoration. You can give it a regular cookie shape as well if you like.
6. Cut the cookie pieces from the pipe, to create “baklava” shape (or I could call it “salmiakki” shape, to be more Finnish!). Put the pieces on an oven tray with baking sheet on it (in the original recipe, it said that you do not actually need to put any baking sheet nor grease the tray, since these cookies themselves are very buttery and do not stick, but I did not want to risk it anyway..). The cookies would spread a bit while baking but not much, so you put them about 1.5 cm away from each other.
7. Bake the cookies for 1 hour. After the 50. minute start checking them, so that they do not turn too brown. In my oven it took exactly 1 hour to bake at 100C but I give you this advice of checking, in case your oven is a bit different.
8. When they are fully cooked, take them out of the oven and leave them to cool down. They would be quite soft when they are first out of the oven so just leave them like that and they will get harder (if you want to cover them with powdered sugar, wait for them to get harder to handle, but not totally cooled. The sugar will stick better when they are still a bit warm.) If you see that they spread a bit too much from the cut sides ruining the nice shape, you can just cut out these pieces.
Enjoy your cookies with fresh warm tea for a cozy afternoon!
My Dear Kitchen in Helsinki 
wow! Never seen these before but will be making them! I have many friends in Turkey but I have never heard them talk about these cookies! I can see myself making these and having them with a mug of apple tea (might as well go all out on the Turkish theme! :) )
well, if you want to go all Turkish, then I suggest you have it with black tea! For some reason, they got this whole apple tea thing for mostly tourists but we grew up with black tea!! Seriously, just have a proper, black tea, and the taste of these cookies will be divine :) and you can also make other shapes with these cookies, for instance some pastry shops sell them in S shape! hope you enjoy baking and eating them!
Sadly I do not have any left, I’ve drank it all! Only have apple tea in the cupboards, so I will have to go back to Turkey some time :) Thanks! It may wait and be a special Christmas treat, along with the Baklava and Turkish delight we have hiding in the cupboards :)
haha good that you have some hidden treasures :) well, this conversation made me feel like having some tea now.. :) anyways, enjoy! i will post more Turkish recipes soon!
Enjoy your tea and I’ll keep an eye out for them :)
I tried making this with the amounts given in the post – I had to use an online converter to see how much sugar and flour it will be (I don’t have a kitchen scale unfortunately..) so in the end it was about 590 ml flour and 230 ml sugar. But I had some trouble making the dough keep together still after all the kneading, it kept crumbling so I had to add a little bit more butter. Do you think I made something wrong with the measurements? After adding the butter the dough finally looked like in the picture and became roll-able, but with my oven being very difficult to adjust the exact temperature, after 50 minutes I ended up with rather golden cookies that expanded almost double in size :) I think they will still taste great, but what do you think is the secret to having them so white, as if they haven’t baked at all?
Hi! I think there is something wrong with the conversion in flour. If you check this link, you will see that the correct amount of flour in “ml” would have been 473 ml: http://www.traditionaloven.com/culinary-arts/flours/plain-flour/convert-100-grams-per-100g-to-milliliter.html So I guess flour being more than it should be, caused the dough to use more butter.
Then about the temperature and your oven: you can start checking already from 30 minutes on.. The ovens are never the same, so maybe yours would have higher temperature or a different spread of heat within itself. You can start checking after 30. minutes and see if they are cooked or not and take out before they change their colours.
Also, if the dough is smooth but still to soft to roll, you can always put in the refrigerator (or even in the freezer if you have too short time) for about 30 minutes to get a better hold of it.
Ahhh 1 more thing: to keep the shapes better, you can also put them in the refrigerator after giving the shape, one more time, for about 20-30 minutes. Then, when you put them in the oven, they will bake more firmly, keeping their shapes better.