Shortbread Stars

Firstly, I think today was the first actual time I have made shortbread. I've probably made ever other type of biscuit in Mum's recipe (slight exageration there), but not shortbread. But anyway, today I decided that I would make shortbread, given that Mum had left me quite a long of thawed out butter (and as many of you would know shortbread requires a significant amount of butter which makes it taste so good but also makes it so bad for you). Although do I decide to make normal shortbread, of course not, I decide to use Mum's new star cookie cutters to make shortbread stars. I thought the concept would be quite simple: make the biscuit dough, roll it out, cut out the stars, put them on a tray and bake for the designated time. Are things ever as simple as they seem? No. It all started to go wrong when I tried to roll out the dough. It kept getting cracks in it, we couldn't have that, could we? After a while I let the rolling pin retire and when back to basics, I used my hands. The cracks disappeared and who really cares if the biscuits are exactly even and flat. Is anyone really going to get out a spirit level and check? The dough also had a bit of an issue with crumbling, even though it was nice and soft from all that butter.

All in all my shortbread stars came out exactly how I wanted them too, except for being slightly overdone. Although I have discovered one thing, due to the star shape of the shortbread, the pointy bits of the stars cook much quicker than the centre of the star. My reason for this is that the pointy bit have a greater surface area to volume ratio than the centre.