Peanut Butter Spritz Cookies: or, More excuses to play with our toys

Well, after recent unfortunate events, anyone want a cookie?

Peanut Butter Spritz Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup white sugar ½ cup brown sugar ½ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp salt 1 egg 1 tbsp water 1 generous teaspoon vanilla ½ cup peanut butter 1¼ cups flour (approximate) Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased baking sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening, sugars, baking soda and salt. Beat until light. Then add the egg, water, vanilla, and peanut butter. Beat until fluffy. Sift in the flour and mix. Put the dough through a cookie press onto the ungreased baking sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes, or until golden on the edges. (Mine were actually done in 5.) When they come out of the oven, immediately transfer to the cooling rack using the metal spatula. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Mirro cookie press instruction sheet via Ebay

Everyone in the house has gotten excited about extruded cookies. I've never seen a modified caulking gun get such a happy reaction. But of course, I don't want to simply make the same recipe over and over again. And so, with everyone in the household within an earshot, I read the recipes from the instruction sheet I lovingly "borrowed" from someone selling a cookie press. I then asked which I should make next. I can't lie, I was glad everyone wanted peanut butter cookies because I wanted them too.

Unusually, the recipe writers have us adding the peanut butter after creaming the shortening and sugar. Most peanut butter cookie recipes tell you to cream all your fats together at once. But who am I to argue with a small army of home economists?

I altered the recipe in two tiny ways. First, I did not use hot water. As we have learned from watching a lot of Ann Reardon videos, dumping hot water into cookie dough (or cake batter) melts your butter. This means you lose all those air bubbles you whipped into it. We used room-temperature water instead.

Second, I tasted the batter and thought "this desperately needs vanilla". It was bland without it. I'm still new to using one of these dough squirters, so I don't know what recipe changes will lead to limp cookie dough that refuses to stay spritzed. But I figured I could safely risk an uncalled-for spoonful of vanilla extract. Everything seemed to go well, but we soon had a lot more dough than I planned. 

I thought that by now, I have gotten pretty good at reading an ingredient list and estimating how many cookies (spritz or otherwise) any given recipe will yield. But as our ingredients merrily spun in the mixer, I began to think I should have used a bigger bowl. Our beaters were unnervingly submerged, and I began to fear burning out the motor. 

Really, I brought this excess of cookies on myself. If I had read all the way to the bottom of the recipe, I would have seen that they clearly printed "yield 6 dozen."

In short order, it was time to start extruding! 

Those who saw our molasses spritz cookies will recall that one particular stencil, which was merely a collection of round dots rather than an interesting shape, produced what easily-amused onlookers described as "a cosmic horror of boobs." In case you missed it, the cookies looked like this:

I'm only a bottle of food coloring and a tiny paintbrush away from getting banned from the church social.

With the above cookies in mind, every cookie press I've seen online has a Christmas tree among its stencils. (Apparently normal people let their cookie squirt guns rest in the cabinets until December?) Anyway, the Christmas tree that came with this one is a cluster of dots.

I had to find out how the Christmas trees would look, and the cookie caulker did not disappoint. Arranging your, um, small pointed domes in a triangle does not make the obscenity charges go away.

This was easily the greasiest cookie dough I have ever made. It left a clear film of lard all over my hands and everything it touched. The cookie gun soon had little clear fat-drips trickling down its sides. The cookies left slick footprints on the pan. I had to wipe the pans between batches in order to keep them ungreased as specified in the recipe.

You can see the cookie-shaped fat slicks on the pan.

Our previous spritz cookie recipes kept their shape as they baked, but these spread out a lot. While this gave the flowers extra-rounded petals and made them look really cute, other shapes did not fare as well. The Christmas trees turned into halfhearted arrowheads. And the wreaths looked like they would only be at home at a future proctologist's medical school graduation party. 

I didn't intend to make six dozen cookies. But on the bright side, they were a very easy six dozen cookies to make. This squirt gun is even faster than dropping cookies from a spoon. If (unlike me) you don't feel the need to constantly stop and change the stencil, you can easily push out an entire pan of cookies in like 45 seconds.

As the mountain of cookies slowly grew on the plate, I kept muttering "These had better be good." The ease of pressing out six dozen cookies did not make me feel better about my failure to halve the recipe. I did not want to run the oven and crowd up the dishwasher for crappy cookies.

To the Mirro people's credit, this recipe works as written. And it produces pretty decent cookies. But they weren't the best I've had either. They had a good flavor (if you added vanilla) and were surprisingly crisp. I think they're the perfect hostess balancing act: good enough that no one will insult your desserts behind your back, but not so good that everyone will quickly eat them all and leave you to suffer the social shame of empty platters. 

But I should note that although this isn't the best peanut butter cookie recipe I've ever made, the quickly dwindling cookie population on the plate told me that a lot of people came back for more. Only this many remained after one night:

If you want peanut butter cookies and insist on making them in cute shapes, this recipe will give you what you need. However, I suggest making chatters instead.