Chocolate and ranunculus
It’s still raining.
So I bought some ranunculus.* 
This is clearly the right thing to do, even if nothing else is clear through the rain on the glasses. I bought my new little friends** on my way to the optician, who proved to be a young Sri Lankan with the most amazing name, it’s enormously long and sounds like a song when she says it.***
I need new glasses. I already knew that. What I was not expecting however was that oval rimless with narrow plain gold earpieces are presently out of fashion. Good grief. How can plain gold rimless go out of fashion? It’s like rectangular black plastic going out of fashion. Dunno, maybe they are too. Although right at the moment it’s all rectangles. I was briefly—briefly—tempted by a pair of very minimally framed glasses, which were a kind of faint metallic pink and had, on their very narrow hinges, a few tiny rhinestones. Barely noticeable, these rhinestones. Barely pink, the barely-frames. Subtle. Mmm. If the lenses had been oval I might have been seriously tempted . . . so what a good thing they weren’t, since the frellers cost over two hundred pounds—WTF, are they diamonds?—and that’s before I’ve bought my madly expensive new varifocal lenses.
Meanwhile the Spectacles Warden† was hunting through spectacles catalogues and the tiny Sri Lankan is going to—ahem!—scope out the selection at the other optician she works for. Who knew a new set of spectacles would be a quest?
I went home with my ranunculuses. It’s still raining.
I want comfort food.††
This is originally from the second Rosie’s bakery book—the Chocolate-Packed, Jam-Filled, Butter-Rich, No Holds Barred Cookie Book—except I’ve messed it around in small and medium-sized crucial ways because I’m like that.
Chocolate Orange Shortbread
1 large egg
½ tsp orange essence (remember I’m talking about ESSENCE not FLAVOURING. Essence is pure distilled oranges and strong)
2 c ordinary unbleached white flour
¼ c fine rice flour (you can use all ordinary flour, but a little rice flour assists that shortbread to-die-for melting texture)
Probably half a cup of sugar. This is one of those places where you need to experiment (I know, I know, I’m already expecting you to experiment with the flour). The original recipe calls for 6T confectioners’/icing sugar and 2T regular granulated. This is about texture again. A lot of granulated sugar will give it a gritty texture—which is lovely, by the way—pure icing sugar will make it wickedly smooth. I like 6/2 but that’s not always what I use.
1 T grated orange zest (REMEMBER TO BE CAREFUL TO AVOID THE WHITE PITH. Which will make it bitter. And for pity’s, and your liver’s, sake, if you’re going to be eating the rind, buy an organic orange. Your average commercial orange is sprayed forty-six ways to Sunday, and not all of it will wash off)
1 c slightly salted butter, soft enough to work but not runny
6 oz very good very dark chocolate, chopped, grated or shaved. Chopped is easiest. I like the texture of grated, if your chosen chocolate will put up with this.
Cut the butter up fairly small and mix it loosely into the flour, and then start rubbing it together seriously either with your hands or the back of a spoon. When it all gets to the coarse crumbs stage, make a well in the middle of it, break your egg into the well, add the orange essence, and beat gently with a fork so the egg and essence get blended before you mix it into the flour and butter. Then mush it into the flour and butter. At the end of this stage you should have a fairly homogenous blob in your bowl. Then knead in the chocolate till it’s evenly distributed. Unless you’re planning on feeding the chocolate-free end to someone you’re mad at.
At this point you’re supposed to pat it into a cylinder, wrap it up and put it into the refrigerator for a few hours, and then slice it into discs. If you actually want to put off making them, this is fine. If you’re a lazy, last-minute slut like me . . . slap the dough into the middle of a cookie sheet with edges and pat it out to the rim. There’s enough butter to make it come out again easily, but if you want to make one extra step (and even I will acknowledge this is a good one), cut a piece of parchment paper to fit your cookie sheet, put the dough in the middle of that and then you can roll it out to size, which you’re not going to be able to do easily on a sheet with edges—but you want those edges to contain the creature. You then transfer the parchment paper—cut it long enough to provide you with handles—to the cookie sheet. You can also not pat/roll quite to the edge of rimless sheets to allow room for squidge, but then it doesn’t bake quite evenly and the finished product doesn’t look quite so satisfactory (I think).
It’s a good idea to mark out the lines you’re going to want to cut on later, but if you forget you can just break it. Crazy-paving shortbread is fetchingly artless.
Baking is also a slightly find-out-what-suits-you-and-your-oven situation. I like 325°F for about half an hour. It may take as much as 45 minutes, depending on the size of your cookie sheet and the thickness of your dough. Your shortbread should be visibly golden (despite chocolate mottling) and you do want it crunchy. (Probably. Doughy shortbread is supposed to be anathema but I think it’s rather good.) If you’ve patted it out evenly then you can stick a knife point delicately in the middle and if it goes crunch you’re set. In fact take it out immediately or it will overcook. It will get crunchier as it cools and you don’t want it brittle. Let cool before you finish cutting/breaking.
And if I’m going to go to bed early I’d better get at it.
* * *
* Ranunculaceae? Except that’s the whole wretched family, including such blighters as creeping buttercup,^ scourge of gardeners all over Britain, so far as I know. It’s certainly a scourge in this bit of Hampshire. And since I won’t use weedkiller I have a lot of it.
^ http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/crbutcup.htm
Ooh. I like ‘devil’s guts’.
** No, they didn’t have pink. Some horrid greedy selfish person had probably already bought all the pink ones. That’s okay though. I like these.
*** It’s also a good bit longer than she is. She comes up about to my elbow. The only other Sri Lankan I’ve met whom I know to be Sri Lankan is tall and thin, like me.
† A small room floor to ceiling with racks of spectacles begins to look a bit like a kind of filigree prison.
†† I also want to go to bed early. Daylight Savings Time and I have not yet reached détente, and I’m losing.
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