Clotted Cream & Stem Ginger Shortbread

My friend came back from Cornwall recently with a little gift of some clotted cream for me. Not one of those tubs you can buy in the supermarket (you know, the sort that doesn't even do a round of cream teas for one person let alone two). No, he brought me a kilo of the stuff. A whole kilo of Cornwall's finest Rodda's Clotted Cream.

That's a lot of a cream. 

So I baked a batch of scones and cracked open the only remaining jar of last summer's homemade strawberry jam. Then I baked another batch, but I was barely making an indent.

Next up was a Clotted Cream & Strawberry Semifreddo. I could have eaten that until the cows came home, but I could feel my arteries hardening with each spoonful, so I donated half of it to the kind bringer of the clotted cream.

Finally, inspired by biscuit week on the Great British Bake Off, I baked these little beauties - Clotted Cream & Stem Ginger Shortbread. 

Ingredients

100g plain flour

50g rice flour

75g Rodda's clotted cream

75g good quality unsalted butter

50g golden caster sugar

2 pieces of stem ginger from a jar, finely chopped

Method

Preheat the oven to 160C.

Combine the plain flour, rice flour and unsalted butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.  Mix in the clotted cream, sugar and stem ginger, then form into a ball of dough, handling as lightly as possible.

Roll out to 1cm thick and cut into rounds using a 4cm straight sided cookie cutter.  You can use any size or shape of cutter you like, but you may need to adjust the cooking time slightly.

Carefully lift each biscuit and place on a prepared baking tray (I use the non stick liner from Lakeland so that I don't have to worry about greasing the baking tray).

Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes, until the shortbread are barely golden.  Leave to cool on the baking tray for at least 10 minutes and then carefully transfer to a cooling rack.