In our column Fake It or Make It we test a homemade dish against its prepackaged counterpart to find out what's really worth cooking from scratch.
Photograph by Kana Okada
Up against the Christmas season's riot of chocolate-coated, frosted, sugar-studded sweets, shortbread is the holiday's most understated cookie. I've always been a partial to the dense, buttery biscuits, but relied on boxes of Walkers to get my fix. Why bother baking when the store-bought stuff is so good? Still, I had to wonder whether I was missing out on shortbread's full potential by not making it from scratch. This holiday season, I turned the question over to my testers.
The Contenders
Walkers Shortbread Fingers vs. ** Martha Stewart's Basic Shortbread
Basic shortbread consists of just five ingredients: butter, flour, sugar, vanilla, and salt. The recipe is Scottish in origin, where it has long been a traditional holiday food, served on Christmas as well as the New Year's Eve festival of Hogmanay. Shortbread may date back as far as the 12th Century; in the 16th Century, Mary, Queen of Scots is said to have loved wedge-shaped shortbread cookies called "Petticoat Tails." Although these days we eat shortbread year-round, it's still most closely associated with the holiday season.
Relative Costs
Homemade is cheaper. I paid $4.29 for a box of Walkers containing 8 bars of shortbread, and about the same for ingredients to make 36 bars of homemade.
Relative Healthfulness
Even. Both contain sugar, butter, flour, and salt. There are no preservatives or other additives in the Walkers version.
Time Commitment
It took me just 15 minutes of active time to make shortbread from scratch, then an hour and half to bake it.
Leftovers Potential
Either variety of shortbread cookie will keep very well. Homemade cookies will be good to eat for up to a month, sealed in an airtight container, and safe to eat (albeit somewhat stale) for much longer than that. Walkers boxes are labeled with a "Best By" date that's up to a year from the date of purchase.
