Lovin’ summer – Kandy Shepherd

Wherever you live in the world, and whatever festivities are special to you at this time of the year, I'm welcoming the opportunity to wish you all the best!

December Down Under isn’t just about celebrating Christmas and New Year, it’s also about celebrating summer. The schools start their long vacations in December stretch right through to the end of January, the universities go even longer.Our Christmas vacation takes place at the hottest, sunniest time of the year!

Many Aussies decamp to the beach and Christmas Day is often not a traditional sit-down dinner in sometimes sweltering heat but a barbecue. In my days as a food magazine editor we came up with recipes to cook that Christmas feast on a barbecue. We discovered that a butterflied turkey—cut and spread flat—works best.

In our family, with British origins on both sides, we go for the full-on indoors feast—and thank our lucky stars for air-conditioning!

I’m sharing with you today one of my favorite Christmas recipes—Macadamia Shortbread. I only make it once a year, both to keep it special and because I love it so much I’d quite happily eat the whole buttery batch again and again!

I'm sharing the recipe for my favorite Christmas treat - buttery Macadamia Shortbread

While shortbread is Scottish in origin, macadamias are very much Australian. Although they transplanted very happily to Hawaii, these delicious nuts are in fact indigenous to Australia.

If you get a chance to make this recipe I hope you enjoy it! 

MACADAMIA SHORTBREAD

1 ¾ cups plain (all-purpose) flour

½ cup cornflour (cornstarch)

250g (8oz) unsalted butter, softened

½ cup caster (superfine) sugar

1 cup macadamia nuts roughly chopped

1. Preheat oven to moderately slow 160˚C (325˚F). Grease and line a 30 x 20cm (11 x 7in) shallow baking pan. Sift the plain (all-purpose) flour and the cornflour (cornstarch) together, then set aside.

2. Cream butter and caster sugar until creamy. Fold in sifted flours and nuts. Press shortbread mixture into the pan. Cut through batter into six squares, then cut each square into four triangles. Bake for 40 min (until just pale golden).

3 Allow to cool in the pan. Transfer to a board and cut into pieces where marked. Store the shortbread in an airtight container.

Note: Recipe works with Australian or American measuring cups, there is only a slight difference.

(The recipe appeared in That’s Life! magazine when I worked there. When I “taste-tested” it, I knew we were onto a winner!)

For many years, I spent part of the Christmas vacation on the beautiful south coast of New South Wales, the state where I live. I love that area so much I created the fictional south coast town of Dolphin Bay in which to set my first novel for Harlequin Romance The Summer They Never Forgot.

The beach, the surf and a pretty harbor are the setting for a deeply emotional romance and brought back happy summer memories for me as I wrote it.

The Summer They Never Forgot, will be released on February 04, 2014 (to give a taste of summer in the northern hemisphere winter!)

Do you have a favorite Christmas/holiday recipe you make every year? Or a recipe you wish someone would make for you? Please leave a comment—I’d love to hear about it!

Kandy Shepherd writes fun, feel-good fiction.

Watch out for  The Summer They Never Forgot, her first release from Harlequin Romance on February 04, 2014 in the US, the UK and Australia.

Kandy’s new contemporary women's fiction e-book, Reinventing Rose, is available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, and other e-book retailers. 

Her romances include the Amazon bestseller The Castaway Bride, Something About Joe, and the award-winners Love is a Four-Legged Word and Home Is Where the Bark Is.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com