The Best Spritz Cookies (filled with Nutella!)

Nutella-Filled Spritz Cookies

I'm basically incapable of refraining from baking during the holiday season.  So, even though this year there was absolutely no reason to bake spritz cookies (that's what those cookie press cookies are actually called), I went ahead and did it anyway.  I mean, it's not like they'd go to waste, plus I had a brand-new cookie press that had just been sitting there unopened for months.  I'm so glad I decided to make them, because it led to my discovery of the best spritz cookie recipe I've found (after a couple of tiny tweaks).

In the past when I've made this type of cookie, the dough simply didn't want to cooperate. The cookies ultimately turned out fine, but they were just a little messy and difficult.  Let me tell you, the allrecipes recipe I used (see link above) is amazing!  And oddly, the secret is yeast (and butter, of course).

Yeast in a regular old Christmas cookie, with no rising required?  I'd never heard of such a thing.  But the reviews were good so I gave it a shot.  And I guess something about the yeast makes this cookie dough a baker's dream.  So easy to work with!

So, first you take your little packet of active dry yeast and dissolve it an a couple of tablespoons of warm water, to get it activated.  The dry yeast looks like this:

As soon as you add the warm water, it starts to bubble up and activate like this:

It's alive!  For real.  After a few more minutes it gets a little creamy looking, like this:

So, while the yeast is waking up from a long deep slumber, take four sticks of softened butter and cream it with a cup of granulated sugar until it's nice and fluffy.  And don't skimp here and try to get by with margarine or shortening.  Only butter will do, at least if you want the very best-tasting cookies!  Not to toot my own horn, but I tried at least three other spritz cookie variations this holiday season, and these took the cake.  I think using all real butter had a lot to do with it.  Here's what nicely creamed butter and sugar looks like:

Then add 2 egg yolks and a teaspoon of vanilla extract (not in the original recipe) along with the yeast mixture:

Beat that together, then begin adding four cups of all-purpose flour, in increments.  I added half a teaspoon of table salt to the flour (also not in original recipe) because I think it's important to include a little salt in pretty much anything I cook.  It's a miracle mineral — even sweets benefit from the addition of a little salt!  Tip: Don't start your mixer on high when you add the flour, or you may wind up wearing most of it.  Start the mixer on low and gradually up the speed.

Now you'll have a lovely dough to load up the cookie press with:

And you get to lick the beater now!  (Unless you're one of those types who shies away from anything with raw egg in it.  I like to live dangerously, I guess.)

Now the fun part is coming up.  Take your cookie press and choose your disk of choice.  I love these things!  Thanks to my mom-in-law Donna who gave it to me for my birthday this year.  Cookie press cookies are so much simpler than cut-out cookies, and just as festive and yummy.  Since it was Christmas, I chose tree and wreath shapes, along with a disk I thought looked rather like a star:

Fill up the barrel and you're ready to roll!

I lined my baking pans with Silpats (well, one with a Silpat, the other with a knockoff.  Not as good — if you happen to be an avid baker, the real thing is worth the money) and started "shooting."  These would be fine right on the pan, too, though.  Just don't grease the baking sheets, or the dough won't stay on them.

I added some green sprinkles before baking to up the festivity factor:

Then put them in a 400 degree oven for 7–9 minutes, until the bottoms were lightly browned (the cookies themselves won't really brown at all.  If they do they're overdone, so watch closely).  Perfect spritz cookie bottoms look like this:

I only have three baking sheets so I had to keep rotating batches.  This recipe makes a lot of cookies!

You'd think that many cookies would last quite a while, but you'd think wrong.  They're addictively simple little bites of sweet buttery goodness.  Like potato chips, it's impossible to eat just one.  Just for fun, I sandwiched Nutella between some of them for a little wow-factor, but left most of them plain.  They're just so good as-is.  A holiday hit!

We enjoyed them thoroughly before our annual Christmas light viewing tradition.  These cookies are definitely going to become tradition, too!

And if you're interested in some non-food related pics, here's some highlights from this year's Christmas lights outing.  Happy Holidays and all the best for 2012!