Shortbread Comparison

A comparison of several recipes:  trying to find the consistent proportions between butter, sugars, liquid ingredients (if any eggs, water, milk), and flours....

A recipe shared by a friend who was not happy with the results (spelties)
My own poppyseed cookies
Several recipes from the Fanny Farmer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham
A pair of recipes from the Time Life Cookies & Crackers book

	Spelties	Poppy Shorts	MC Scotch	MC Gustafsons	MC Shortenin	TL Shortbread	TL Dorset Shortbread
butter	100.00	170.00	227.00	113.50	227.00	227.00	227.00
Sugar	80.00	200.00	83.00	50.00	100.00	50.00	62.50
Liquid	55.00	236.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Flour	250.00	600.00	300.00	225.00	300.00	200.00	450.00
butter/flour	0.40	0.28	0.76	0.50	0.76	1.14	0.50
(butter + liquid)/flour	0.62	0.68	0.76	0.50	0.76	1.14	0.50
(sugar + liquid)/flour	0.54	0.73	0.28	0.22	0.33	0.25	0.14
(butter + liquid)/(flour + sugar)	0.47	0.51	0.59	0.41	0.57	0.91	0.44

The most consistent thing I see here is the ratio of butter + liquid to flour + sugar.  While sugar does liquify during the baking, the recipes come up radically variable looking at sugar as a liquid ingredient.  I was deliberately trying to make my poppy shortbreads a little less rich, which is probably why they have the lowest butter/flour ratio--they're not really very classically crumbly. 

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