Holiday Sweet
Happy holidays! Hope you are getting on well with your holiday plans. What have you planned for Christmas this year? Favorite Sweet Dish, of course, but which one?
Have a look at this video. This comes from Great Harvest Bread Company in Cary, North Carolina. You may want to change your Favorite Sweet Dish to Spritz Cookies. They are easy to make and great to eat. You can have a look at these ideas and pass them on to your children.
They might feel to start a new tradition with them! Nothing wrong with learning new things, isn’t it? Go ahead and watch it carefully.
a… I’m getting hungrier and hungrier counting down my favorite holiday sweets a.. of all time and you know it changes, I mean I don’t have to stick with them like I showed you, they’re not all that of a Charles Dickens novel because they’re ancient Plumb Pudding or something. The things you learn as you go along, and that’s one of the great things about cooking and baking especially here at the Great Harvest Bread Company in Cary, North Carolina. They are very passionate about their breads and you should be as well.
Examine some of these ideas that I’m giving you and pass them on to your children. Begin new traditions with them. You don’t know what they’re going to be doing when they are in their mid forties with video camera telling everybody how they remember making cookies with you. You’re creating memories for your family and my number two favorite holiday sweet is Spritz Cookies. Those melt in your mouth, Butter cookies. That are always very frustrating to get out of that holiday press. They’re either bagged with a pastry bag into star shapes or you can get a holiday press and make them into reeds or Christmas trees and I’ll show you how we do that.
So, today we’re going to do Spritz Cookies and I’ve saved the.. the best for last because this is my favorite cookie at the holiday. Don’t really eat them any other time a year and when you see them, you’re going to go Aha! That reminds me of the holidays.
Now we’ve talked about the mixing method is the same but the makeup methods with the Cookies. There is basically a… six or seven basic ones. Drop cookies we talked about like the Chocolate Chip Cookies, they’re dropped down a pan and baked. Ice box Cookies. You can freeze portion dough or you can put the dough into a log and freeze it, come back and slice it, take those off, it’s an ice box Cookies. Bar Cookies. We have done this in a casserole with a — cracker —, sweet and condensed milk and so on, that’s hardly baking, its more assembly but cut or walled Cookies is another type. This is like the Sugar Cookies, cut them with a Cookies —.
Today, we’re talking about pressed or bagged cookies and our Spritz Cookies are going to be done in a pastry bag or bag them out onto a sheet pan. This is also we can use grandma’s Cookie press, you know the long cylinder thing with a handle, the ratchet th… it always gets clogged. Th.. th.. it really is tough to deal with. But if we take the correct cooking method, the correct mixing method, we should have no problem with any of these.
I’ve got my butter here. This is 4 ounces or one stick of butter. The question always asked of it salted butter, unsalted butter. My feeling is I can always put the salt in if I want, I can’t take it out, so I always use unsalted butter. To the fact I have 2 ounces weight of granulated sugar. The two of them go together in the bowl and a.. you know how this works — and creamed them together until they’re nice and light and fluffy and consistently mixed.
After few minutes of mixing lets stop the bowl and see where we’ve got. This is perfect. This is exactly what I’m talking about with a creaming method. Look how creamy and smooth that is. It doesn’t look granular like sugar, it almost looks like ice cream or something.
—– Spritz Cookies come of the mixer, a… and again, you don’t want to over mix Cookies. As a matter of fact, its always best to use Cake flour in most cookies. Cake flour has less protein than bread flour or all purpose flour does.
The less protein, the less glopping that you can develop. Glopping developed through moisture and agitation. Glopping is what gives you the chewy — the chewy French bread, the chewy — of crust. We don’t want chewy a… Spritz Cookies, we want them as delicate as possible.
I’m going to twist the bag and this is what applies the pressure to push things out the lip of the bag. The mistake a lot of people make is squeezing with their left hand, this bottom hand that pushes the item of course up toward the top. What we want to do is squeeze with my right hand here at the top of the bag so I got myself a nice little sheet tray and what I’ll do is start with a spiral. Starting at the bottom, press, come around a little bit and then down and up and pull it up that way.
All right, before my Spritz Cookies go in the oven, I can hit them with a.. little bit of these non — or if you go to your cake supply store or your basic craft store, you can get colored sugar like that.
Spritz Cookie time! Spritz Cookies are out of the oven and man! They look really really nice but you can see the real nice design we’ve got on my S cookie that I put the non — in. Here’s my T cookie that I did with nothing and the one that we did with a.. the green powdered sugar looks like that. They look really nice, the Spritz Cookie and they have the flavor of the holidays.
They can be piped out into any shape and it is like all of them, a basic creaming method. Fat and sugar first, eggs, liquid if any sifted dry ingredients and then these are bagged cookies.
Have a fantastic time this holiday season, I hope you enjoy your family. I hope you enjoy your stove and your mixer and your kitchen. I hope you find your way back in there to learn and use some of these cooking methods.
Tags: outdoor cooking, cooking terms, cooking for one