Sour Cream Spritz Cookies: or, More fun with extrusions!

Usually, you need to buy a sewing box to get cookies like this.

Sour Cream Spritz Cookies 1 cup shortening 1 cup sugar ½ tsp salt 2 egg yolks ½ cup thick sour cream 1 tsp vanilla 4 cups sifted flour Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening, sugar, and salt. Beat in the yolks. When mixed, add the sour cream and vanilla. Beat until light. Lastly, mix in the flour. Put through a cookie press onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes. (Mine were done in 6.) Immediately upon removing from the oven, use a metal spatula to remove the hot cookies to the cooling rack. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

I'm not making an official project of going through every single recipe on the Mirro cookie press instruction sheet, but I seem to be drifting that way. Like all the Mirro recipes we have made so far, today's cookies start with sugar and shortening. (Perhaps butter has never been reliable enough).

I was surprised at how well the nutmeg toned down the almost glow-in-the-dark whiteness of the first ingredients, especially given how it failed to do exactly that when we made the sandies. You could really see the color difference after plopping the stark-white sour cream on top.

You can tell how good the mixture tasted by the big finger-swoop I lifted out for taste-testing.

As is surprisingly often the case, the flour added the most coloring to the cookies, changing them from a barely-tinted white to a creamy shade of yellow. Also, we had to add a lot more flour than the ingredient list tells us to. Maybe it's the humidity.

Here I must pause and note that I partially made this recipe to test whether this handmixer that turned up in a thrift store could live up to its instruction manual's optimistic claims. To my surprise, it barrelled through the cookie dough without making any sad whining noises. Instead of giving up, it kept trying to kick the bowl over.

I initially wanted to put a lot of stencils into the press, but this clover was so cute that I pushed out a whole pan of them. A few of the cookies came out malformed, which seems to always happen. Instead of reloading the dough into the press, I decided this was the perfect chance to try other ways of shaping them. That way, I can be ready for the day when this spritzer breaks. (It's fun to use while it lasts, but I suspect it won't last long.)

The little round cookies I shaped by hand looked really cute until you compared them to the four-leaf clovers right next to them. If we zoom in on one, you can see why you don't need to grease the pan for these. They left lard footprints wherever they landed. Check out the shiny spots peeping out from under the edge of the cookie.

Our cookies baked in half the time given in the recipe. Purely for scientific purposes, I may have to splurge on a Mirro cookie press like the one our instruction sheet came with. It may produce bigger cookies that need a longer baking time. In fact, one may already be in the mail as I write this. (Sometimes my willpower needs a rest.) If the Mirro press works as well as the Mirro recipes, it can't arrive too soon!

These cookies were softer than the other spritz recipes we have made so far (aside from the peanut butter ones). They tasted a lot like the sugar cookies we clipped out of a 1933 newspaper. More than any of the other spritz cookies we have made so far, they taste like a recipe that was lovingly handed down to you. They're somehow both crisp and melt-in-your-mouth soft. In full disclosure, the molasses cookies remain my favorites (so far). But these are now my favorite plain ones.