Part of my message to Morticia got snipped - I must have hit backspace delete. I told her she was welcome to come to Tea at my house whenever she was next in los Angeles!

As for savory shortbbreads, after reverse-enginerring this recipe, I came up with a number of recipes for similarly not very sweet shortbreads including:

Pesto Walnut Shortbreads
Lemongrass Cornmeal Shortbreads
Pine Nut & Shallots Shortbreads
Chedder & Onion Shortbreads (using dehydrated onion bits)
Cilantro & Sun Dried Tomato Cornmeal Shortbreads

and a few more that I never wrote down because they weren't such a big hit.

I agree with Bat Goddess that if you are going to use sugar, and you usually must, there's nothinjg wrong with using a sandier sugar, sayfor example superfine ground. Feel free. The main reason I started using powdered sugar was to avoid any burst of sweetness in the mouth since her memory of the original was that it wasn't sweet at all. Some sugar IS needed get the taste right.

Finally, I have also taken the dough for these shortbreads, and after some brief resting in the fridge, stuffed it into a spritz cookie press with a and piped it out into straws like Southern Cheese straws.

To do this right, you need a very large cookie sheet and you pipe the dough out the full length of the sheet atop parchmenet paper. The baking time is reduced of course perhaps to 12 minutes and you may want the heat to be higher, say 350 Degrees. When done, lift the parchment off the cookie sheet and let the straws rest in order to harden up a bit. When completely cooled, you can pick them up and let them break into irregular lengths or "straws". Store in tins for up to a week.