Baking Challenge 1: Almond Spritz Cookies

Greetings friends!

Happy Valentines and happy lunar new year!

I love holidays! Gives me an excuse to be creative with little goodies for the people around me and also to challenge myself. This week is pretty interesting since we have Valentines Day on Wednesday and Chinese New Year on Friday!

Back in Hawaii, almond cookies are a popular way to celebrate Chinese New Years, so I knew I kind of wanted to do something almond. Anyway, while on a trip a few weeks ago and my mom found chewy cinnamon heart candies. These reminded me of the almond spritz cookies my mom would make during Christmas. She used the cinnamon candies to accent her wreath cookies, so why not use those candies and make some spritz cookies for Valentines Day? And I could also finally bust out the OXO cookie press I got during Christmas!

So I looked up a few recipes and decided to try out these two from Taste of Home and Genius Kitchen.

Taste of Home Almond Spritz Cookie Recipe

Genius Kitchen's Almond Spritz Cookie Recipe

The Taste of Home recipe interested me because it uses brown sugar. The base is very similar to a chocolate chip cookie base more than a traditional spritz. Anyway, lets get to the nitty-gritty of baking these cookies!

The OXO cookie press! I was so excited to try it out!

Gathering my ingredients and measuring out the
dry before starting on the actual dough.

Cinnamon heart candies! These are sweet and
provide a nice burst of flavor for the cookies.

Ok, it's time for me to give a KITCHEN TIP!

I had to bust open a new bag of flour. Of course, it's a pain to store it after and deal with the little rectangular bag and opening and closing it is a mess and hard to get measurements straight from it, so I thought to myself... I have this huge empty container from my protein shakes, I should use that! So I did! Wide lid, can store quite a bit, even comes with a scoop! GENIUS!









Lol, ok... So after I did this and was quite proud of what I did here, I went on to cream my butter.

Recipe tips and adjustments: Recipes usually say to cream the butter and sugar together. I like to cream the butter first and then cream it with the sugar. This allows the butter to get fluffier and lighter before adding in the sugar and making a huge mess all over the kitchen counters!

In addition to creaming the butter separately, I doubled the amount of salt from 1/4tsp to 1/2tsp. I often find baked goods don't have enough flavor because they are lacking salt. I also use salted butter. I KNOW EVERYONE SAYS NOT TO, BUT IT USUALLY TASTES OILY IF I DON'T!!! D:

I also doubled up on the amount of almond extract. 8D

The dough was a little darker in color because of the brown sugar, so when I added the food coloring, it wasn't as vibrant as I was hoping.

My first batch onto the cookie sheet turned out pretty well! I would later stick the dough in the refrigerator, which would've been fine for a few minutes, but I left it in there too long, so I had a hard time with the dough after that. I recommend the dough being slightly cooler than room temperature when pressing the cookies. The OXO cookie press otherwise worked like a DREAM! Oh I am in love with this cookie press!

  
Anyway, that was it for the first recipe. They can burn very easily, so make sure to take them out pretty much right as they start to brown on the edges. This was right at 7 minutes for me. The taste is good, but I feel like the brown sugar flavor masks the taste of the almond. I decided to run out to the market to try the second recipe after eating about a dozen of the ones I burnt. :3

TLDR Version:

• Salt adjusted to 1/2tsp from original recipe.

• Doubled amount of almond extract. 

• Salted butter. 

• Don't refrigerate the dough for too long. Just slightly cooler than room temperature is perfect! 

Ok, after eating all those cookies, and after eating a lot of chocolate the day before... And knowing that I would be eating more cookies later... I decided I desperately needed a gym break!

100 minutes of cardio, baby! Over 1200calories burned! AWRIGHT! Also, GO CANADA! Yeah, I'm originally from the US, but Canada is, overall, such a sweet country. I support your athletes! <3

Ok, went to the market and got some shortening for the next recipe!

So, I don't usually like to use shortening in my baking, but there are recipes that call for it and supposedly, it's best in pie crusts, but I also found out they sell lard and I really would like to test between shortening, butter, and lard for crusts. Perhaps during the summer! But I digress!

I actually chose this recipe because it uses shortening. I looked at some recipes for Hawaii-style almond cookies and the most popular also used shortening, so I thought this recipe might be similar to those cookies.

Anyway, here's how that went!

Recipe tips and adjustments: Treated the shortening like I do regular butter. I was worried it would taste oily, though, and decided to add in a little bit of salt (about 1/4tsp) to the shortening. I'm glad I did, because it did taste kind of oily and not quite as lush as the first recipe. 

I also used 1/2tsp salt instead of 1/8tsp, and added in 1/2tsp vanilla extract.

The dough was really crumbly, much like pie crust dough, so I was a bit concerned that the cookies would just fall apart after baking.

After putting in the food coloring, I rolled it into a ball by hand and placed it in the cookie press. It was mostly ok, but didn't come out of the cookie press as nicely as the first dough and would kinda of come out in flaky clumps.

Eventually, I got it to work out ok. The colors came out a lot more vibrantly since there was no brown sugar to dull them, but the consistency in the texture wasn't as nice. These cookies also burn pretty quickly. 6 minutes was perfect for me.

The cookies held up surprisingly well. It was harder to get it out of the cookie press properly and it's not as flavorful as the first recipe, though the almond flavor is more pronounced. I would probably use the same recipe and replace the shortening for butter in this recipe if I had to chose between the two to do it again. I also might add in a little extra sugar. Aside from that, they are still good cookies and their texture is good. My opinion on shortening versus butter has not changed by this recipe, however. Lol.

TLDR version:

• Added 1/4tsp salt to shortening while creaming. 

• Increased salt from 1/8tsp to 1/2tsp from original recipe. 

• Added 1/2tsp vanilla extract.

Overall, both cookies came out successfully. I would like to try to put my own spin on these, but this was my first test run and trying to document the process. It was a lot of fun! Also, I need to find out why one recipe uses baking powder and the other baking soda. I know I read about it once, but of course, I have forgot the reason.

Through this experiment, I also decided to retire one of my cookie sheets.

Here's another KITCHEN TIP! Don't buy cheap cookie sheets! My sister got me a set of copper bake-ware and I get really nice cookies from that baking sheet, but in my haste and cheapness, I decided to buy a second, cheap baking sheet before Christmas. My cookies burn and cook quite unevenly on this cookie sheet. I can't rely on it, so it has gotta go! D: I would like to invest in the nice Williams Sanoma baking set one of these days. I spent the holidays using those to bake cookies back in Hawaii and they were amazingly consistent.

Anyway! I will be baking some brownies as my official Valentines Day gift for my work team tomorrow, so please look forward to that! And if there are any tips, questions, or recommendations on what to do next, please feel free to comment!

Thanks for reading and happy baking! :D