cookies that cast a butter spell
If you, like me, think that butter is one of nature’s prime offerings—the best tasting purely of the pasture—faintly earthy, smooth, and silky in its density, then you possess a true baker’s soul.
In this cookie dough, butter, the generously creamy fat, transmits immaculate flavor and, along with sugar and two egg yolks, composes a dough that, when baked, vaporizes lightly into tender crispness between bites. It is the butter that, when you open up the cookie tin, promptly commands all senses, urging you to eat just one more cookie because its taste carries with it a long, vanilla-stroked finish.
When softened butter is creamed until pearly and highly malleable, it is ready to welcome a certain amount of sugar, egg yolks, flavoring, and a sifted composite of flour, baking powder, and salt. The meeting of the elements is a fine one: a soft dough is formed—it’s not at all right for rolling or hand-molding, sticky as it is—and sits pretty in a pastry bag furnished with an open-star tip.
If the idea of a pastry bag filled with something to be piped seems like some wretched plan for imminent disaster, relax. If you can squeeze and form the capital letter S, then you can make these cookies. Anyone who can write is sure to achieve this with a little practice: in a show-and-tell way, I teach cooks to start just under the top of the S, then swing up slightly and around to form the top, come down to make the long swirly curve, and finish by creating the bottom curl, tucking the end slightly into the lower, inside arch. The dough is supple enough to work in this way, and you may have to rehearse compressing the bag while simultaneously forming the cookie a few times to accelerate the action and load up your sheet with all those graceful cookies. If the first few attempts look misshapen and scrawny, do what I do on occasion—open the bag, plop in the malformed pieces of dough, and start over again. No one will ever know. But for all the truly nervous first-time pastry bag pipers, buy a jar of mayonnaise (the cheaper, the better), fill the bag, and practice on a sheet of waxed paper.
Traditional piped cookies are tight little affairs, with exacting, clearly articulated lines and spirals and, rest assured, they are firmly tough to eat. These are not. The leavening present in this dough opens up the crumb and, on baking, extends it. A pattern is still distinguishable, though, and enough of it is present to capture in its soft folds sprinklings of granulated sugar. That mist of sugar forms a slightly crunchy, luminous coating.
Gorgeous with coffee, the cookies are best hidden and doled out with discrimination. Be prepared, as people will beg you for more. It is for this reason alone that this, my oldest, most-extensively tweaked recipe, finally perfected in its current incarnation and a restructuring of the original (bakers seem to change and refine things relentlessly), yields the quantity it does. The basic spritz cookie recipe (the launching point for this formula) was handed down to me at age seven, just about the time my paternal grandmother gave me her “secret” brownie recipe. Even now—so many years later—I can visualize the cookie dough being squeezed out from her hand-held aluminum cookie press.
butter and sugar cookies
serving: about 6 dozen cookies (using Ateco tip #823)
ahead: 1 week
butter and sugar dough
33/4 cups unsifted bleached all-purpose flour
11/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 pound (4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
12/3 cups plus 2 tablespoons superfine sugar
2 large egg yolks
41/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
granulated sugar, for sprinkling on the piped cookies before baking
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Outfit a 14-inch pastry bag with an open-star tip, such as Ateco #823.
Line several heavy cookie sheets or rimmed sheet pans with lengths of ovenproof parchment paper.
For the dough, sift the flour, baking powder, and salt onto a sheet of waxed paper.
Cream the butter in the large bowl of a freestanding electric mixer on moderate speed for 3 minutes. Add the superfine sugar in 3 additions, beating for 1 full minute after each portion is added. Blend in the egg yolks, one at a time. Mix in the vanilla extract. On low speed, beat in the sifted mixture in 3 additions, mixing just until the flour particles are absorbed before adding the next portion. The dough should be quite soft.
Fold back a wide cuff on the pastry bag and fill the bag about one-third full with the dough. Flip up the cuff, smooth down the dough, and twist the top closed.
Pipe swirly S-shape cookies 2 inches apart onto the prepared baking pans, placing 12 swirls on each standard-size pan. Refill the bag as necessary and continue piping. Sprinkle granulated sugar on top of the piped cookies.
Bake the cookies in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes, or until set and golden in color. The raised edges will be a shade darker.
Cool the cookies on the baking pans for 1 minute, then slide a wide offset metal spatula under them and transfer to cooling racks. Or, you can cool the cookies on the parchment paper by carefully easing each paper filled with cookies onto a rack. Cool completely. Store the cookies in an airtight tin.
notes
• this recipe is a composite of my grandmother’s cookie-press cookies and my traditional holiday S cookies, and reflects the best attributes of each (as well it should, for I have spent more than 20 years perfecting it)
• before you begin, make sure that the butter has softened thoroughly, for several hours perhaps, otherwise the dough won’t be as creamy-textured as it should be and will offer significant resistance to piping; despite everything, if the cookie dough is cranky and unmanageable, all is not lost, as you can form 1-inch balls of dough, roll them heavily in granulated sugar, place them on the cookie sheets, press them down with the tines of a fork to striate, and bake until golden (I had to do this myself once on a brutally cold December evening when, despite 6 hours at room temperature, the butter was not as yielding as it should have been)
• the amount of flour is pivotal to the structure of the dough and its piping consistency; the formula was developed in a room-temperature, low-humidity environment, but you may have to increase the overall amount by 2 to 3 tablespoons in the presence of higher humidity or even on a cold and rainy day
• the value of using superfine sugar cannot be overstated here—the extremely small, sharp granules make a fine, noteworthy dough that bakes the tenderest cookies imaginable
• on baking, an under- or over-leavened butter dough destined for piping, such as this one, creates textural havoc and returns a less-than-delicate cookie, so make sure that you measure the baking powder precisely
• about filling the pastry bag: piping cookies is unwieldy if the bag is overfilled with dough, so filling the bag about one-third full allows you to control the contents and, then, the resulting shape of the cookies
• keep all yet-to-be-piped dough covered with a sheet of food-safe plastic wrap
• baking the cookies until golden makes them tender from the center to the edges; underbaking the cookies (for example, leaving the middle sections light) will create denser, less fine-grained centers
• never consume raw cookie dough
• historical recipe data: first things first—Grandma never piped this cookie dough from a pastry bag; the older formula used cake flour, a larger amount of baking powder, granulated sugar, and a smaller amount of vanilla extract
butter and sugar cookies