The serendipitous Scottish shortbread stamp

We are busy attending to maintenance issues at Towerwater. The biggest maintenance issue at this time of year is the whitewashing of the walls and buildings on the property. To prepare the walls for limewashing requires a lot of scraping to remove any loose limewash before applying the new coats to the walls.

When we have enough building rubble and garden refuse to make a justifiable load, I load the bakkie and take it all to the dump. At the dump, the building rubble and the garden refuse sections, are in different areas.

What I normally do is load the bags of building rubble last to offload them first and then I drive to where I must dump the garden refuse.

When I offloaded the first bag of building rubble, lying in the dust near my feet, what looked like a medallion with an eagle on it caught my eye. After offloading all the building rubble, I picked up what looked like a very dirty carved medallion of an eagle.

On closer inspection, I realized that it was not a medallion but a piece of carved wood. I picked up the black dome shaped wooden object by what looked like a knob at the end. On the side of the dome was stamped “Made in England”. After a closer look at the carving on the flat part of the dome, I saw that it was a thistle flower and leaves.

I remembered where I saw this emblem or something close to it. It was on a traditional Scottish shortbread. Suddenly I realized what I was holding in my hand, it was an antique Scottish shortbread stamp.

Now I was really baffled. What was it doing amongst building rubble at the Bonnievale dump? Perhaps it was lying in an old kitchen that was demolished and carted along with the rubble to the dump. The fact that it survived intact was a miracle.

What was an antique Scottish shortbread stamp doing in Bonnievale in the first instance? Did I perhaps pick up a piece of history that came with the Scotsman, Christopher Forrest Rigg, who formalized the water canal project that made farming in Bonnievale possible in the late 1800’s. One will never know.

Picking up a Scottish shortbread stamp so close to Christmas is serendipitous. It’s like the universe is willing us to make Scottish shortbread part of the Towerwater Christmas tradition. After sterilizing and cleaning the stamp, I oiled it with olive oil to feed the dry wood and prevent further damage.

Not to disappoint any guardian angels, we decided to make some Scottish shortbread incorporating the thistle stamp. The classic shortbread recipe is made with just three ingredients, well I suppose four at a pinch.  We used castor sugar, butter, and flour (and a pinch of salt) in the ratio of 1:2:3, sugar/butter/flour. 

The recipe is so easy to make and adjust to make more or less of this teatime treat.

Towerwater Scottish shortbread

Ingredients:

½ cup castor sugar
1 cup butter
1½ cup cake flour
a pinch of kosher salt

Method:

Cream butter, sugar, and salt together in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy.

Slowly work in the flour until a crumbly dough forms.

Place on a pastry work surface and use a rolling pin to roll into a compact rectangle to an even thickness of 10mm, or put the pastry into a pan and compress.

Use a cookie cutter that is slightly wider than the shortbread stamp and cut your cookie before stamping it while still in the cookie cutter. This will help the dough to press into the stamp without flattening the shortbread too much.

Remember to dust the surface of the stamp with flour before stamping the shortbread each time.

Place your stamped shortbread on a greased baking tray and place it in the freezer for 30 minutes.

After taking it out of the freezer, bake your shortbread for five minutes at 200°C. Turn down the heat of the oven to 180°C and bake for further 10 to 15 minutes.

Keep an eye on your shortbread to make sure that they do not go dark. You want your shortbread to be a light cream colour.

Let the shortbread cool down before dusting it with castor sugar. Store in an airtight container.

Note: Remember that the flavour of the shortbread will depend chiefly on the quality and flavour of the butter.

And that is how the serendipitous shortbread stamp found at the dump ended up making delicacies in the Towerwater kitchen.