ALL BUTTER CHERRY SHORTBREAD

Makes 16 or so  pieces:

340g  /12 ozs plain flour

227g  /8 ozs butter

113g  /4 ozs castor sugar + extra for dusting

113g /4 ozs chopped glacé cherries (Morello glacé cherries if possible

Preheat oven to 170 degrees C /160 degrees for a fan oven /325 degrees F /  GM3-4)

Lightly grease shallow baking tray and line with parchment.

Sieve flour into bowl and add chopped up butter pieces. Rub butter into flour until mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Add chopped cherries and caster sugar.Draw mixture together to form a ball and knead very lightly using floured hands until smooth. Press mixture into baking tray and prick all over with a fork.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 35-40 mins or until the colour of straw and shortbread is firm to touch. Remove from oven and score the shortbread with la knife to make cutting pieces easier. While still lukewarm dust with castor sugar, shaking tray until all shortbread is covered. Shake off any surplus sugar and cut into pieces along the marked lines. Remove the shortbread from the tray (you can lift the whole thing out in one go with the baking parchment if the tray has been well lined). Leave to cool completely on wire rack.

These were very buttery. I made 1 and a half times the amount and this cut into 24 smallish pieces, which was a good size for church.

Nature Notes

Daffodils in Balliol College front quad

Two weeks ago one glance out of the kitchen window was rewarded with 3 different butterflies –  brimstone, a cabbage white and a tortoiseshell. A bumblebee, like an off piste dodgem car ambled in through a living room window and a seven spot ladybird dosey with the first signs of warmth fell into a coffee cup (fortunately empty). But since then, nothing of the friendly, showy insects.

On the bird front, I’ve finally worked out that the sparrow-like birds with the finch-like bills (small and spikey as opposed to big and beaky) are dunnocks or hedge sparrows and that they do not like sharing the bird feeder with the sparrow sparrows. An occasional robin appears and a wren or two bob around in what I always thing are rather fetching finely checked capes. The great revelation though has been the woodpecker whose swirling drumbeat alerts us to the morning. I had thought it was the green woodpecker without his yaffle but have since been told it’s the greater spotted on (black, white with red patches). The kites have revelled in the changeable weather and,  swanky show offs that they are, have taken every opportunity to perform their sedate aeronautical routines above the fields (a performance that  never quite fits with their weedy mewing call). Last year we heard no cuckoo at all and I read that the chiffchaff (another little brown jobbie but distinguished by a rather skilful application of eyeliner, Eqyptian style) had for many taken the cuckoo’s place as the herald of spring. Today I think I heard my first chiffchaff of 2014 but I might have got it confused with a tractor harrowing the field behind whose mechanical raspings seemed to pick up the rhythm and coarsen the music of the bird’s song until I was no longer sure quite what I was hearing. There are very few blackbirds. However, the rooks are building high in the trees overlooking Goring Station and according to folklore, that means a good summer.