All Butter Shortbread Bars (Classic Cookie Recipe)

5 from 27 votes

Easy homemade all butter shortbread bars with only 3 ingredients. A quick and easy classic cookie recipe without cornflour and rice flour.

Prep Time30

Cook Time10

Total Time40

Course: Dessert, Snack

Cuisine: American

Servings: cookies

Calories: 75kcal

Preheat oven to 170°Celsius. Line baking trays with parchment paper.
Place butter in a medium-sized bowl. Add flour and mix on low speed until the mixture turns crumbly. If mixing by hand, rub in the flour and butter with your fingertips until both ingredients are well incorporated and the mixture turns crumbly.
Add the sugar and mix until it is well incorporated into the flour and butter.
Turn the mixture onto your workspace and press it together to form a ball.
Divide the dough into sections. Roll each section and cut it into rectangle bars.
Place the cut shortbread cookies onto prepared baking trays.
Bake for 10 minutes, until the sides of the shortbread start to turn light golden.
Remove the cookie bars from the oven and let them rest on the baking tray for a few minutes before transferring them onto wire racks to cool completely.
Store the shortbread bars in an airtight container.

- Butter should be soft but not melted. Ideally, when you press your finger into the butter, it must still be firm, but soft enough to be poked.

- The baking time indicated in the recipe above is for bar shaped cookies in the size of 1 inch by 3 inches. The thickness is about ½ cm. If your cookies are larger or thicker than this, the baking time would need to be increased accordingly. And if they are smaller, then the time needs to be reduced as such.

- This shortbread bars recipe calls for the use of granulated sugar. Powdered sugar is a good option too, but not coarse sugar. Coarse sugar is too coarse and you will see little specks of sugar in your baked shortbread bars.

- Also, if you are intending to use powdered sugar, remember to measure it with a weighing scale. Cup measurement for granulated and powdered sugar is not the same, meaning, 1 cup of granulated sugar does not equal the same weight as 1 cup of powdered sugar. For the shortbread cookies recipe below, you would need to use 100g of granulated or powdered sugar.

- The cookie dough, once formed, is soft, but not sticky to the touch. However, it does tend to stick a little to the rolling pin as you roll it. For smooth rolling, place it between 2 parchment sheets. That way, it will not stick to the rolling pin and will be a lot easier to work with.

- And when lifting the cut shortbread bars onto baking trays, using a spatula to lift them is really helpful in retaining the bar shapes.