Pink Jam Shortbread

Last month, my office took part in the World’s Biggest Coffee Morning for Macmillan cancer support.

Naturally, I made my Nutella Cheesecake and Oreo Truffles – they always go down a treat! But I wanted to expand my otherwise scant baking repertoire.

I saw this recipe on BBC Good Food and thought it looked simple enough for a rookie like myself! I’ll be honest… I googled “child-friendly baking recipes” which gives you an idea of my confidence levels!

The recipe is described as a Pink Jam Slice: A pretty in pink traybake sponge. However, I consider this more of a shortbread recipe than a sponge (at least, that’s how mines turned out), and Irene & I decided that it was mighty tasty, therefore I am blogging it for all you treat-lovers out there!

Ingredients (Makes 8 generous slices)

• 300g (room temperature) butter
• 120g caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 500g plain flour
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 500g icing sugar
• Hot Pink food colouring (I used this Dr. Oetker ‘gel’)
• Jar of homemade strawberry jam (thanks to my colleague James’s mum!)

I decided to use my heart silicone cake mould. Isn’t it pretteee?

First and foremost, I preheated the oven to 180 degrees (fan).

In a bowl, I combined the butter, sugar, vanilla extract and egg yolk and whisked for 1 minute on the high setting of my hand mixer (good on ye if you can hand-whisk it… I’m too puny).

I stirred in the flour and a pinch of salt, then used my hands to form a dough, like so.

I pressed half the shortbread mixture into my heart mould, slathered jam over it (leaving a wee border around the sides), then crumbled the rest of my mixture over the top, pressing down gently.

I baked it for 35 minutes exactly. It came out lovely and golden!

I left it to cool completely. In fact, several hours passed before I touched it again!

Now, this is where the BBC Good Food recipe and I fall out… they called for ‘up to 100ml’ water mixed with the icing and food colouring. I’ve since been told this is a ludicrous amount! I used about 3 tbsp water and a few squirts of the food colouring gel through my icing powder, and it was too runny! I made a few squiggly patterns over the top using a toothpick and extra dollops of food colouring, then hoped it would dry and harden overnight…

It did set, but only slightly. It began to get all drippy on the journey to work! The next time I make this, I’m starting with a teaspoon of water for the icing and working my way up…

Alas, the icing dried in again once it was out on display with the rest of the delectable treats. Look how talented my colleagues are!

Not only did we eat ourselves into a blissful cake coma, we managed to raise over £150 for Macmillan Cancer Support. That beats last year’s amount of £145, yasss!

The recipe says it’ll keep in a tin for up to five days. I can only vouch for 1 day… who can keep a cake for a whole five days?!

I’d definitely make this again, and would recommend it for a bake sale, feeding a crowd, or any occasion really (Oh look it’s Wednesday… lets eat cake!).

Enjoy 😀

Catherine x