Shortcrust Pastry
Shortcrust pastry is an extremely useful and versatile preparation. One I quite love to be honest. You can use it to bake cookies, prepare jam tarts or as the seasons get warmer create wonderful and colourful fruit tarts...but these are only a few of the many things you can create with one single pastry.
This recipe is very special to me, I learned it many years ago at a Christmas cookies baking class and I have to admit, I haven't found any other that equals it.
Ingredients
500g of flour
300g of soft butter - just remember to take it out of the fridge an hour or two before you start preparing it
150g powder sugar
1 egg
1 bag of baking powder - this very much depends on what you'll bake, I usually add it for the cookies but not when I make the base for the tarts. It's up to you, without the baking powder they'll be a bit crunchier
1 bag of vanilla sugar or one 1 tsp of homemade one
Preparation
mix the sugar with the soft butter
incorporate the egg and start kneading
add the vanilla sugar, baking powder (if you wish) and flour and knead into a ball
wrap in film or in a bowl with a lid and let it rest in the fridge for at least one hour - don't worry, when you'll knead the dough it will be quite crumbly and not so easy to knead together, do as much as you can and then let it cool in the fridge.
