52 minutes ago, Anna N said:These definitely appeal to me but I’m not into cutting out cookies with cookie cutters and my experience with slicing rolled cookies has always been abysmal. So I’m wondering how easy you found these to slice. Did they have a tendency to crumble? Did they deform as you sliced? I am sure it is operator error but after struggling with Dorie Greenspan‘s World Peace cookies I swore I would never try this again. But these do look good. Thanks.
So far, I've made 3 slice and bake shortbreads from this book and they all sliced quite easily.
The only minor issue I had with crumbling was when the knife encountered one of the inclusions (crystalized ginger here, olives and juniper or rosemary leaves in the other cookies - posted over in the savory topic) very close to the edge of the cookie, a little crumble tended to break off. It was easy to pat the little piece back on the few cookies where that happened.
They didn't deform too much, although I noticed that after a while, the bottom started to flatten out a little so I tried to rotate the log after a few slices and put the log back in the fridge between batches so it wasn't sitting on the warm board. The other versions I made were square and triangular logs so I didn't have an issue there. In all cases, they were in the fridge overnight and quite firm.
I followed Dorie Greenspan's method for making a tight roll but needed to chill the dough a bit first because it was too squishy at room temp.
Put the roughly shaped log in the center of a piece of parchment paper and bring the far end of the paper over the roll
Pull the bottom layer of parchment towards you as you use a bench scraper or some straightedge tool to push the top layer of parchment against the bottom of the roll.
It took me rather more pushing and pulling than shown here but was still fairly quick:
