Christmas Spritz Cookies
When you're spritzing cookies, one should never be too careful. They're so easy to pump out, you'll soon find yourself up spritz creek without a paddle.
Servings 3 thousand or so
Equipment
- Spritz Cookie Press See notes below
Ingredients
- 3.5 cups - Flour
- 1 teaspoon - Baking Powder
- 1.5 cups - Butter 3 sticks, softened
- 1 each - Egg
- 2 tablespoons - Milk
Variant I
- 2 tablespoons - Peppermint Extract
- 17 drops - Red Wilton Color Right System
- Vanilla Candy Drizzles Bag or something similar
Variant II
- 2 teaspoons - Salted Caramel Treatology Flavor System
- 15 drops - Yellow Wilton Color Right System
- 4 drops - Blue Wilton Color Right System
- 2 cups - Salted Caramel Hot Cocoa Candy Melts
- garnish with Turbinado Sugar
Variant III
- 2 tablespoons - Gingerbread Extract
Glaze (for Variant III)
- 1.5 cups - Powdered Sugar
- 3 tablespoons - Milk
- 7 drops - Yellow Wilton Color Right System
- 2 drops - Brown Wilton Color Right System
- 1 drop - Red Wilton Color Right System
- 8 drops - Warm Cinnamon Graham Treatology Flavor System
- Sprinkles or colored sugar whatever lights your tree
Instructions
- Turn on oven to 350F
The Cookie Base
- In a bowl, combine the flour and the baking powder and just set it aside.
- Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer until fluffy.
- Add the egg, milk, and whatever flavoring and/or coloring variant you're going with.
- Once that's in and mixed, the flour mixture goes in until incorporated.
- Now you rinse and repeat for however many variants you're doing. What I did was I made the dough, pressed them out and baked them before I ever started another batch. It worked out pretty well and didn't feel like a drag since getting through the batch was pretty quick.
Readying Cookie Press
- Get your press ready. Easiest way to do it is to pick out your discs, screw it on, then take a handful of dough and roll it into a log.
- You're aiming for the same size as the tube that you're pressing out of. When it's rolled up, just slide it in. You may have to take some off or whatever but hopefully for the most part it's an easy fit. Once it's in there, get the handle part on and screw that in.
- Like I mentioned, you want a clean sheet tray with nothing on it. All you have to do is put the press on the tray, pull the handle till you hear the click, and boom, the cookie appears.
- When it's loaded up, put the tray in the oven for 10-12 minutes. When they come out, put them on a cooling rack and that be that.
Peppermint Cookies
- Either use the bag of melts or melt your own chocolate (put chips in a micro safe bowl and cook for 1 minute then leave in there for a minute or two). Then drizzle the melted chocolate on the cookies and sprinkle with sprinkles.
Salted Caramel Cookies
- This may be harder, as at the time of this post, candy melts in the flavor of Salted Caramel Hot Cocoa were readily available. If you can find them, great! If not, I would melt some chocolate and incorporate some caramel extract/flavoring and then sprinkle lightly with a coarse sea salt after dipping.
Cinnamon Graham Cookies
- Ah, another "hey, they don't make this no more!" flavor. Ok, get yourself some icing (powdered sugar and a splash of milk and whisk to a nice spreadably thick consistency) and flavor it with gingerbread extract. Whisk in some cinnamon there too and you've won for the day.
Decorating
- Finish off whatever cookie however you see fit. I used sprinkles because duh.
Notes
- This is a very simple, very easy to follow recipe... That I successfully made ridiculously complicated.
- You're going to need a cookie press of some sort. I recommend the Wilton Simple Success Cookie Press. It's cheap, which is what I look for in once/twice a year gadgets, and looks like it'll get the job done. (this is an affiliate link that I will hopefully get commission off of if you purchase through it. Thank you!)
- I'm also using the Treatology Flavor System as well as the Color Right Performance System. (Note from future me: I'm not completely sure if these are still available. Check instructions above for alternate flavors)
- There are 3 very different types of cookies going on here. There WAS going to be 4, a chocolate cookie, but time did not allow it. Also, it would've been out of place in the post as it is a totally different recipe, not just a variant.
- And just to be clear about these 3 different cookies... If you want to make the gingerbread cookie for example, you'll need to use the first part of the recipe, along with the variant with the gingerbread extract. And if you want to only do the peppermint and salted caramel variants, then you'll have to do 2 separate recipes - one for the peppermint, one for the salted caramel.
- I just felt like I had to explain that. If you already knew that then go ahead and bake yourself a cookie, smarty pants.
- I wanted a red color, a green, and a regular cookie color. The red obviously went to peppermint, and the regular color went to gingerbread. Which means the green color got stuck with salted caramel, which indeed, totally messes with your head.
- If you do what I did, it's probably going to make more cookies than you know what to do with. So I hope you have friends. Or a holiday party to cater or something.
- Seriously. I had so many cookies, I gave a dozen to 3 different neighbors, a dozen to the UPS guy who was at the right place at the right time (boy, was he happy), I sent about 2.5 dozen to some friends in California, and we STILL have enough to last us into the new year. This recipe will easily let you make it rain cookies on all your loved ones.
- You don't want to line your cookie sheet with anything. You don't even want to spray it. The sheet has to be completely naked. When you're using the cookie press, the cookie dough is meant to stick to the sheet so you could just press, lift, and move on to the next one. If the sheet is lined or greased, it'll make your hopes and dreams of becoming successful cookie factory machinery blow away like dusting sugar.
- Speaking of dough, you do not want to chill it like you would normally do cookie dough. If you chill it, it'll be much harder to squeeze out of the tube when pressing.
