As promised, this is my family's amazing butter cookie recipe. This has been passed down for many generations on my father's side of the family, and has spread throughout my whole family at this point. These small, buttery, sweet-but-not-too-sweet morsels are cousins to the shortbread cookies that are some of my favorites. The recipe is simple, but not necessarily easy. The key to perfect butter cookies is to only handle the dough enough to get the consistency you need. If you don't mix it enough, the cookies won't come together. If you handle the dough too much, you run the risk of the cookies being too hard. You have to find that 'goldilocks' zone.
A cookie press is a must. I use an electric cookie gun. The below picture shows a typical assortment of cookie press disks and what the resulting cookie will look like. For most of the disks, you would hold the gun/press upright and apply the dough in one spot. The only exception is the biscuit disk in the bottom left corner. This one requires the user to press the dough while moving the press in a straight line. It is easier and better to use another disk for these butter cookies.
The recipe is large. I guess you're supposed to make a LOT of cookies, give them away to all of your friends and family, then wait a year to do all over...I don't know. So here are the ingredients:
6 sticks of butter
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1 egg
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
5 cups of flour
Start by preheating the oven to 350 degrees and letting the butter naturally soften to room temperature. From there, mix the butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla with an upright or hand mixer on a lower setting. Add the flour gradually until the dough is mixed and malleable. This is where that 'goldilocks' zone comes in. Make sure that the dough is fully mixed together, but don't handle it too much. Once it is mixed, put the dough into the cookie press, and start creating.
When I was little, my mom could successfully add food color to the dough for added variety, but I'm not as good as she was. I stick to colored sugar and sprinkles to decorate mine. Feel free to experiment. I'm sure that many of you are far better bakers than I am.
In my experience, the best size is about one inch by one inch. For my electric press, that's holding the trigger for about 4-5 seconds. The cookies pictured above are about the right size.
These go in a preheated 350 degree oven for 8-10 minutes. (Higher altitudes might want to drop the temp to 325.) You'll know the cookies are done when you see the bottom edge turn a slight golden color. This recipe yields 100-120 cookies depending on the size of the individual cookies.
The recipe itself is simple, but trying to hit that 'goldilocks' zone and baking 120 cookies brings the recipe from simple to medium intensity, lol. In the end, these are the best cookies I have ever tasted, so I make them more often than I probably should. I hope others appreciate them, too. Let me know what you think.
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