Pistachio shortbreads

It's been a quiet week.  I was diseased, and then the not-ginger was poxed.  It's been fun (and by fun, I mean the total opposite of fun).

Back into it now though, more or less.  Now that I can eat again, I needed cookies. 

(Oh!  Definitely worth mentioning that somehow, while in the grips of disease, I managed in my fevered state to come up with an argument in favour of the Missioni towels (I posted a pic a couple of weeks ago) that the husband agreed to.  Ha!  Of course said agreement may have been part of the delirium, but we'll cross that bridge after I have new towels.)

Said cookies ended up being Pistachio shortbreads from Ottolenghi, The Cookbook (and are seriously amazing, FYI).

I really love biscuits with a noticeable amount of spice, so I always have to try recipes if I see them.  Often and disappointingly though they're loaded with sugar so that they still appeal to mass taste for sweet biscuits.  To me, that almost totally takes away from the spice ... which I guess is actually the idea.  Something a bit different without being different.  A bit like Belgian biscuits.  I love the idea of them and depending on the recipe, I can usually do one, but ug.  Usually they're so sweet it hurts.

Anywway, these babies have a good amount of cardamom in them which is a reasonably newly appreciated taste for me (clumsy sentence, but you get the idea) and very little sugar (25g of icing sugar).  Rice flour picks up in this one I think where many recipes have cornflour to give them that softness and texture.  They're brilliant.  The recipe calls for them to be sprinkled with vanilla sugar but I didn't have any and didn't have the ability to make any (no vanilla pods - I use paste and that wouldn't be any good mixed with sugar for sprinkling, obviously) so I used coconut sugar instead.  I'd be interested to see how that changes the flavour from vanilla sugar at some stage when I have some, but in the meantime, I'm happy as a happy thing with how they turned out.  Coconut sugar has quite a caramel taste.  It's uber lovely.

The shortbreads don't have pistachios in the dough.  The nuts are chopped pretty finely and rolled into the outer edge.

I made two thicknesses - the recipe said to cut them 5mm - 1cm thick.  I did one tray at 1cm, and one tray at 5mm.  I prefer the thicker shortbread, though they maybe look a little bit weird, because they are very small (4cm across roughly).  I thought they'd spread, but of course, there's nothing in them to make them do so.