KELSO — In a world made increasingly complex with microchips and megabytes, it’s nice to know that it’s still easy to satisfy the taste buds. In that spirit, Scottish shortbread fits the bill perfectly. In a jiffy, cookies can be made from three ingredients: flour, sugar and butter.
This year’s Highlander Festival offered local shortbread enthusiasts the chance to match their time-tested recipes against those of other competitors. This year’s event fielded 31 bakers vying for prizes.
The top place winner was 11-year-old Alexsys Manning of Kelso. She said she and mom, Stormie, tested their recipes on her family, including father Ben and brothers Guiles and Gabriel.
The home-schooled student’s recipe, called Shortbread Dreams, was a hit with the whole family, Stormie said. She and Alexsys made the cookies, and they all disappeared in a couple of hours.
“We made, like, 50 of them, and the next day poof! All gone!” Alexsys said.
Her batch of cookies included a dollop of raspberry preserves and the secret ingredient: almond extract.
“It’s good,” Alexsys said. “I just liked everything about them. We put raspberry preserves on them, and that’s what made it pretty tasty.”
On a more traditional note, the second-place winner, Jean Robertson Lamoreaux of Centralia, entered a family favorite called “Maw Broon’s Shortbread.”
Robertson, who came to the U.S. from Scotland eight years ago, said she has been baking shortbread “since I was a wee girl.”
The recipe she used came from an old Scottish recipe book, “Maw Broon’s Cookbook,” which had been handed down over the generations in her family.
The shape and look of the shortbread is distinctive. Rolled out into a baking tin, the cookie is precut into wedges and pricked with a fork.
“I’ve tried other versions,” Robertson said. “But this one, I just love far more than all of the other recipes I’ve tried. From what I learned from my grandma and mother, authentic shortbread should have a crust on the outside and be softer toward the center. The semolina gives it that crunch.”
Third-place winner Dianne Mattson of Kelso also used a family recipe with a twist.
Mattson said she has many shortbread molds and decided to do a little experimenting.
“I used different ingredients, going off the basic recipe,” she said, adding that the original cookie ingredients were handed down on her father’s side of the family, coming from her great-grandmother in Scotland.
When she added some Tahitian vanilla to the mix, her taste buds told her she had a winner. Unlike the usual vanilla extract cooks use, the Tahitian form comes in a paste and is stronger and sweeter, Mattson said.
She added an extra egg to the ingredients and used some oat flour she had ground at the Cedar Creek Grist Mill near Woodland. The crowning touch came from her mold, which impressed the shape of a thistle — the national flower of Scotland — onto the cookies.
All three of the cooks agree that the best part of their cookies is that they’re homemade. The tiny secret ingredients add flavor, but the love they put into them finds its way into the taste as well.
“For me, it was a connection to my dad,” Mattson said. “I’ve always loved shortbread, but when it’s homemade, it tastes so much different than what you buy in a box.”
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