The mean street posset

The pack of spices that a friend of mine gave me as a present for my birthday has featured a lot in my cooking over the last year. The main use of the spices has been in savoury main courses and soups so for a change on the first Sunday in January I decided to use some of the spices in a sweet dish that could be eaten as a pudding.

The friend who gave me the spices now lives in the Manchester Area so the appropriate record for the preparation of the dish was the Smiths' final album Strangeways Here We Come a record that is equally as good as its predecessor the much more well-known the Queen is Dead.

The dish to be made was Posset shortbread. I first mixed together together around a hundred grams of margarine with one hundred and fifty grams of caster sugar until the margarine took an almost hairy appearance due to the sugar being mixed well into it.

The next step was to add one hundred and twenty grams of plain flour, some posset shortbread spices, to the margarine and sugar which I then stirred thoroughly into the margarine and sugar. I knew I had stirred the spices and flour properly into the margarine and sugar as it created a dough that was very pliable as well as being smooth to the touch and shiny to look at.

I spread some plain flour onto my work surface and put the dough on top of it. I then rolled out the dough with a rolling pin, after first putting some plain flour on the pin, to stop the dough sticking to it. I rolled the dough out to form a large circle and then cut it into pieces that were about five centimetres across.

I put the pieces on a greased baking tray and cooked them in the oven for fifteen minutes at one hundred and seventy degrees (one hundred and eighty degrees for non-fan ovens). I knew the shortbread was done because its edges had become brown and when I put a meat skewer through it came out clean.

While the shortbread was cooling down on a wire rack I made my own version of lemon posset by filling a milk pan three quarters of the way to the top with plain Greek Yoghurt and the juice from two lemons. I heated the mixture on the hob until it was warmed through and then served it in a bowl into which I dipped the shortbread when it was time to eat it. I find that some recipes use double cream instead of Greek Yoghurt but the Greek has the advantage in that it is healthier for you than double cream and prevents the dish from being too rich for its own good.

The results of the cooking produced shortbread with a sweet taste, as you would expect with shortbread, that was offset against the strong almost aniseed like taste of the spices. The lemon posset however provided a refreshing contrast to the spices and took the edge off them.

The Lemon Posset cooking on the hob. A healthier option without the cream.

The shortbread cooling on a wire rack after it had been cooked. 

Shortbread dipped in posset to stop the spices being too overpowering.