Spritz Cookies

Most of you are probably at least passingly familiar with those brightly decorated butter cookies that always spring up around Christmas. They are simple, sweet and crumbly, and come in a variety of shapes with little sugar sprinkles on them. There are a few different ways to make cookies like this - one way is to make a stiffer dough that rolls out and use shaped cutters to extract cookies in the shapes you please. But that's too much work - much easier is the simple spritz cookie.

A spritz cookie is really just any cookie issuing from a spritz press, or cookie press, a cylindrical extrusion device using perforated disks to create differently shaped cookies. A cookie press can be bought at most department stores or home goods markets like Target or Bed, Bath, and Beyond, but of course, the jungle is also fruitful. There are a number of different doughs that can be pressed through a cookie press to make what would reasonably be called spritz cookies. Some of these include ground nuts or nut pastes, or spices. This recipe, which we make every year, is a simple butter sugar cookie, and it's really more about the process and the shapes than it is about having a sophisticated flavor. Sometimes simple is okay.

Spritz Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 3 egg yolks
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 1/2 cups flour
• sprinkles, colored sugar, or other tiny edible decorations

Cooking Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Cream the butter in a large bowl using an electric mixer. Mix in the sugar to this. (In Texas, you could just dump this in a deep fryer and call it good. Fried, sweetened butter is a legitimate dessert in the South.)
   
3. Beat in each egg yolk, one at a time. Add the vanilla, and then blend in the flour with a spoon or a spatula. The dough should become pasty - yielding, but cohesive.
   
4. Fill the cylinder of your cookie press, fitted with the shape disk of your choice. (Read the instructions on your particular press to learn how this all fits together.) Press out the cookies onto ungreased bare metal cookie sheets. This may take some trying - different presses extrude different amounts of dough with each lever action, and while some press instructions will say one lever is enough, they didn't necessarily test with the same kind of dough you're using. Experiment with different numbers of lever pushes to get the cookies to come out the right shape and size for your tastes - this will likely even vary by shape disk, so be patient to get it right.
   
   
   
   
5. Decorate the cookies with your choice of sprinkles, sugars and other assorted edible sundries.
   
6. Bake for 7 to 10 minutes, until they become golden brown around the bottom edges. They'll still be rather pale on the top. Cool on racks.
   
7. While transferring to the racks, some of these cookies will inevitably be broken "by accident". It will be necessary to, eh, dispose of such defective and still warm cookies. Use your best judgement at this step.