{Recipes} The Easiest Shortbread you will ever make!

We are sharing the recipe for our shortbread cookies from our recent Rainbow art party. This is our favorite Shortbread Recipe! Not only is it the easiest shortbread recipe you will ever make....it is super yummy as well!

Hand Painted Watercolor heart Cookies

Pantone Inspired Cookies

We have been making these shortbread for many years. They only require 5 simple always on hand ingredients. They never fail and are delicious plain, iced, dipped, or even filled. Unlike most shortbread...these do not crack apart as easily...making them a great alternative to the typical sugar decorated sugar cookie. We decided to use these in our recent Rainbow party for that very reason and they are always a child favorite. Read on for the recipe.

Serendipity's Super Easy Shortbread

1 1/2 cups or 3 sticks butter at room temperature (we use salted. *gasp* lol...unsalted if you wish)

1 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract (we prefer pure, but artificial will work)

3 1/2 cups Cake & Pastry flour (all-purpose will work)

1/4 teaspoon salt

1. In a large bowl, mix together (with handheld or standalone mixer) butter and sugar until they are just combined. Add the vanilla.
2. In a medium bowl, sift together flour and salt, combine with the butter-and-sugar mixture. Mix until the dough starts to come together (on low). We like to bring the mixture together with our hands at this stage for best results.
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
4. Prepare a surface dusted with flour. At this point you can also divide the dough into four pieces, flatten, wrap and chill for later use. Or you can roll out to 1/4 inch and cut into shapes. You can also roll the dough into a log and slice into 1/4 (or thicker) slices and bake.
5.  Place shapes or slices on a cookie sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes. Depending on your oven. We bake using convection and they pop out perfect at 10 mins.
6. Cool cookies. Enjoy as they are or add icing. We used a larger heart to cut out our cookies and the next size heart down for the rolled fondant hearts. We then hand painted the cookies with Wilton gel colors diluted with water. :)

ENJOY!