Scottish Shortbreads with Mascobado Sugar

I'm not a great cook but I try to find the better ingredients. So I always was impressed in a negative way by the use in cakes and desserts of the beet sugar, which I consider pretty tin-pot both taste than nutritional wise.
Instead I like a lot cane sugars, the more unrefined, the better. Particularly I like the sugar called "mascobado", which is produced in the Philippines trough the old process consisting in just evaporating the molasses. It's a dark brown unrefined sugar, granular and with an adorable, in my opinion, aftertaste of liquorice.
It also contains various nutritional principles, like mineral salts and iron.
The forthcoming recipe is a very traditional scottish one, but using this kind of sugar the result will be a bit different in taste and aspect than the one you're accostumed to.


Ingredients for approximately 12 biscuits: 1½ cups of all-purpose flour, ¾ cup cornstarch, 8 ozs. butter, 3,5 ozs. mascobado cane sugar, salt, vanilla extract.

Preparation: heat the oven to 300°F and let the butter soften at ambient temperature. When the butter will be soft enough blend into the sugar and work it until it'll become creamy. Then pour into slowly the flour and the cornstarch, continuing to mix, and at the end a pinch of salt and some drops of vanilla extract. Continue to mix until the dough won't have any huge lumps. Spread out the dough into a pan making it the most even possible using the back of a spoon. It has to be at max less than 1 inch high.
Put into the oven for about an hour until the surface of the dough will become well browned, then take the pan out, cut the dough in 12 parts, sprinke it with some sugar and put it in the over for another additional 10 minutes. At that time let cool the pan completely before removing delicately the biscuits from it (they're fragile!).