Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Spritz Cookies (and need help with flawed chocolate frosting)


This is just not my week for baking. I had to make some spritz cookies for a friend. She was paying me to prepare little cellophane bags of 6 cookies each with coupons for her salon attached. I'm going to hand them out at work tomorrow. Ya know, a kind of promotional thing. Yesterday, after my white cake disaster, I had many many egg yolks remaining since the cake took 12 egg whites. So, I found a highly rated spritz cookie recipe on allrecipes.com. The recipe I found used egg yolks instead of the whole egg and since I needed a LOT of spritz cookies, I made a triple batch and that used up 9 egg yolks! Yeah, right? Sigh. This recipe just was not good. I should have stuck with my favorite spritz cookie recipe that I always use. These cookies weren't horrible, they were just kind of flavorless and they had an odd texture with no snap. Kind of almost cakey. They almost taste like they have cream cheese in them. The folks who rated them on allrecipes thought they were great. I don't understand. But, they looked pretty and since people are getting these bags of cookies for FREE, they really can't complain right?

So, I'm not going to suggest that you make these spritz unless of course you are into cakey spritz. I like them crunchy myself.

Hopefully my next post will be something I can actually recommend. I still have that huge bowl (about 10 cups) of unperfect chocholate frosting in the fridge. I'll will tell you about it and maybe you can make suggestions. I hate to toss the whole thing because the frosting actually tastes good. Yesterday when I made the frosting, I had to stir really hot cream & sugar into a large bowl of butter & chocolate and stir until it all melted. Then you cool the whole bowl until it thickens. I did that, I thought. I say I THOUGHT because after the mixture was really cool, it had lots of little chocolate bits still in the frosting and that's how it is now in the fridge. It's completely thickened and really nice and fudgy but has very noticable bits of dark chocolate (semi sweet - so not horrible to bite into) all throughout. So what is your suggestion on what to do with this huge bowl of frosting? I thought about topping a pan (or 2 or 3) of brownies and then sprinkling some mini chocolate chips on top so it looks like I meant to have bits of chocolate in there. I also thought about pushing it through a sieve but it's very thick and fudgy at this point. Help!! I hate to waste it!





Spritz Cookies


Ingredients:
1 cup butter
3/4 cup white sugar
3 egg yolks
1 teaspoon almond extract
3 cups cake flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (205 degrees C).
2. Cream together the butter and the sugar. Add the 3 beaten egg yolks and one teaspoon of almond extract. Mix until well blended.
3. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Gradually sift into the butter mixture and stir well.
4. Chill until firm (2 - 3 hours).
5. Using a cookie press, press out cookies onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes.

1 comment:

cookies and cups said...

I would do exactly what you said, add some mini chocolate chips and top brownies or cupcakes or make cookie sandwiches with a delicious chocolate/chocolate chip frosting.
The spritz cookies look yummy, but I am with you on the bit of crunch! Pretty purple!