Opinion

Savour the luxury of homemade shortbread

By Jaci Hicken

Dec 5, 2025

Shortbread was considered a luxury food due to the cost of butter, making it a special treat for occasions like Christmas and weddings. Photo by Jaci Hicken

Jaci Hicken, our seasoned journalist and trained chef, has been busy in the kitchen preparing easy, low-cost Christmas recipes that you can cook and share and gift as personalised Christmas baked-goods.

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It is amazing how tasty this simple shortbread recipe is.

I’ve found myself having to sample a few too many pieces of this rich, buttery, crumbly Scottish biscuit in the lead-up to Christmas.

You use rice flour, which you can find in a red box in the flour section of the supermarket, to give a traditional Scottish shortbread the grainy texture you can taste.

This Christmas, I’ve pressed and cut my shortbread into a shape known as petticoat tails, which, according to Historic UK, is attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots, as she was said to be very fond of her shortbread in this shape, flavoured with caraway seeds.

If you don’t want to cut your shortbread into petticoat tails, rounds and fingers are also traditional shapes.

To press and cut petticoat tails, divide the dough into four, then use an 11cm cookie cutter to form the round shape.

You can make only one large petticoat tail if you want.

I cut my dough into four to make the cooking time a little bit shorter and knowing myself, if I’d only made one biscuit I would have had to eat the whole biscuit at once.

If you are going to cut your shortbread into rounds or fingers, cook for a shorter time, more like 15 minutes rather than 20.

Once you cut the petticoat tails, you leave the biscuits joined together to bake, then break them into shapes once they are cooled.

If you want to add a bit of Christmas decadence, sprinkle over caster sugar once you remove your shortbread from the oven, before they have cooled.

You sprinkle the sugar while the shortbread is still hot, so that it slightly melts into the shortbread and sticks to it.

Shortbread became a Christmas tradition very early on, as butter was a luxury food for ordinary people, so shortbread was reserved for special occasions such as weddings, Christmas and New Year's celebrations.

With the price of butter currently in the supermarket, shortbread will likely become a luxury food again!

Ingredients

180g of plain flour
50g of rice flour
60g of caster sugar
150g of butter at room temperature
Extra caster sugar

Method

Preheat your oven to 160°C or 150°C (fan forced).
Sift the flours together, add the sugar, then rub in the butter until a stiff dough forms. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until very smooth.
Roll out until 5mm thick, then cut into your shortbread shapes. I’ve rolled and pressed my shortbread into petticoat tails.
Bake at 160°C until pale yellow, about 15 to 20 minutes.
When you remove it from the oven, sift the extra sugar over, then leave the shortbread to cool.

If you would like to follow along with baking your own shortbread you can find the recipe online in the Riv app.

Enjoy this Christmas tradition.

– Jaci