Rainbow Shortbread Cookies

I made these colorful rainbow shortbread cookies for my younger kid to share with his friends in school. Kids love them and they are so easy to make!

The basic shortbread recipe contains just 3 ingredients: sugar, butter and flour in the ratio of 1:2:3. Thank you Guai Shu Shu for this very helpful tip! I shall not forget the recipe for shortbread from now on! I followed the recipe wholesale from that blog so I will not type it out here. I will instead show you how to make the rainbows :).

You begin by portioning the dough into 6 portions and coloring them with gel food coloring:
Red - 81g
Orange - 69g
Yellow - 56g
Green - 44g
Blue - 31g
Purple - 19g

I worked out the math for you so you don't have to figure out how to portion each color :). To make your life easier, place the dough into quart sized ziplock bags. You can even work at coloring the dough while reading the newspaper, which I did! Place the dough in the fridge after you are done. The dough can keep up to a few days in the fridge so if you need to run off to do something, you can just chuck the dough into the fridge without having to worry that your bake will fail.

Make another small batch of uncolored dough using 1g of icing sugar, 2g of butter and 3g of plain flour, and put it in another ziplock bag. Roll this into a thin log with the width of the ziplock bag as a guide. Refrigerate this dough until it becomes rigid.

Take the purple colored dough out of the fridge and leave it out for about 5 minutes. Roll it flat with the dough still in the bag, filling the whole width but not the length of the bag. Cut the bag open and wrap the uncolored dough with the purple dough. Cover the whole assembly with the cut opened ziplock bag and put it in the fridge. Proceed with the blue dough and so on. I have used the yellow dough to illustrate this process:

This is how a completed rainbow log should look like:

Again, you may store the cookie dough log in the fridge until you are ready to bake the cookies. Perfect recipe for busy people who can only afford short periods of baking time! Just make sure that you keep the dough tightly wrapped to prevent it from drying out.

When you are ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Cut the log into 15 slices, and cut each slice into two to form rainbows. If the dough gets too soft to work with, place it back in the fridge for 5 minutes before resuming your work. Place the cookie dough on a baking tray lined with baking sheet:

You may wish to cut out the center uncolored dough if that's what you prefer. It is necessary to include that in the log of dough for shaping the rainbow. Bake it for 15-20 minutes and you are done! Just be careful not to overbake or the colors will not show up well.

Enjoy!

Update: I made these cookies again but with clouds added! Use 160°C to bake instead to prevent the cookies from browning. You may replace some plain flour with cornflour for a more tender bite.

With love,
Phay Shing