Here’s another good cookie press recipe. It’s a long way away from the holiday season, and cookie cutters/presses tend to get a bit dusty during the spring & summer months. I had a bunch of shapes for the press that weren’t holiday-related, so I decided to get creative with some colors & flavor extracts and use 17-55: Scottish Shortbread to play with the press.
Theirs look really thick–mine came out thinner since I used the press. These would probably work well with differently-shaped cookie cutters too, not just rounds. As I learned, they also work well with food coloring and flavor extracts.
I ended up using these for Mother’s Day gifts, and made a mix of three colors/shapes to bag up and mail/hand out. 💐
I wasn’t too far off by adding flavors to my cookies–Simply Delicious even suggests it in their “Tips” section. I cheated by using bottled flavors, but zesting rinds would have worked too. Even using liquor instead of extracts would work too–ideas in case you want to add flavors and you don’t have extracts on hand.
There’s a note of mine on here, but I’ve never actually made this recipe. We made shortbread tart shells at the restaurant, and I had initially intended to use this recipe to make shells for tarts at home. I never got to it though, and so this technically remains untested. However, since I’ve made a ton of similar shortbread before, I feel okay deviating from the recipe a bit with flavors and colors.
Ingredients–there’s not many of them. I didn’t end up using too many of those colored sugars (although I could and should have), but I did use more flavors than shown here. I made three full batches to get the immense amount of cookies that I ended up with, but I had a specific vision of three different colors/shapes of cookies mixed together.
Chopping up the butter before mixing it makes it easier to whip up and integrate with the sugar.
I like using the stand mixer for stuff like this because it delivers a consistent product–hand mixing can leave unblended clumps of butter or sugar.
Here’s where things get crazy. I wanted more of a lilac color, but ended up with a deeper bluish-purple. Not a great start–coloring things can be difficult sometimes. These have flavor to them too–I started with rum extract and orange extract for the purple ones. I went really light with the flavor on these–they were the hardest to detect in the end, but I was afraid of over-flavoring them.
I added a bit more red, but it’s still a lot deeper than I originally planned. Oh well, hopefully I’ll do better with the next ones. I loaded this one into the press, picked a disc, and gave it a shot.
I really love this cookie press.
Look how springtime-y and whimsical they are! Next up: lime green.
I feel a lot better about the color on this one, and I flavored it with lemon extract and coconut flavor since I thought it seemed light and airy.
These were supposed to be the shell cookie (you can see the disc in the ingredients picture), but let’s all be honest–especially with the color choice, these look like marijuana leaves. They’re not, and don’t have any in there, but the color/shape choice was poor.
Not all of the green cookies came out that brilliantly green (or looking like pot leaves)–here’s why you don’t always trust the times on the card. 20 minutes is WAY too long for these cookies at the thickness (or thinness in this case) that they are–8-10 minutes is just about right, 12 at the max.
The third and final batch was more of a salmon/orangey color (which is pretty much what I was going for), and I flavored it with anise and almond extracts. These were the most potently flavored, but it was a nicely mixed combination.
By this point, my cookie presser/sous chef/husband was tired, so all of the salmon-colored anise/almond ones ended up being hearts.
Here was my cheat sheet so I could remember what I had put into each batch. This was from the notepad I acquired during a recent trip up north to a really nice place in Klamath Falls, OR.
Here’s the final bagged product before it was gifted/mailed out. One of those bags got eaten here though–they are very good cookies.
Grade: A
