Soft AP flour vs Hard AP flour

[Candy]

I wanted to play with a shortbread recipe and realized I only had White Lily which is a soft wheat flour and makes lovely biscuits and things of that sort. I used it to make a brioche dough for caramel sticky buns and also in the World Peace cookies a couple of weeks ago.

For shortbread I usually use unbleached regular (hard wheat) flour and rice flour. I used my standard recipe of 2 sticks unsalted butter creamed with 1/2 C. sugar, 1 2/3 C. flour, 1/3 C. white rice flour and 1/4 tsp. vanilla. But I used the White Lily flour with the rice flour.

The shortbread made with regular AP flour has a bit of a snap to it but this time with the soft flour the shortbread had a very tender crumb and almost melted in my mouth. I may continue to use the White Lily. DH liked them very much.