Velvet Cookies: or, Not bad, but not enough peanut butter

This is the first peanut butter cookie I've seen that doesn't put it in the recipe title.

Velvet Cookies ¾ cup shortening 2 tbsp peanut butter ¾ cup powdered sugar 1 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 2 cups flour Heat oven to 400°. Cream the shortening, peanut butter, powdered sugar, baking powder, and salt. Beat in the egg and vanilla. When all is well-mixed, sift in the flour and combine. Load into a cookie press, and pipe onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes, or until golden on the edges. (Mine were done in seven minutes.) When you take them out of the oven, immediately take them off the cookie sheet with a metal spatula and put them on a cooling rack. Source: How to Make Fancy Cookies: Recipes from the Mirro Test Kitchen (undated, probably mid-1940s or early 1950s)

How to Make Fancy Cookies: Recipes from the Mirro Test Kitchen

Today, we are playing with our cookie press again! Unusually for a recipe on the Mirro cookie press instructions, we don't start with a bowl of all-white ingredients. It seems like every Mirro recipe begins with creaming the sugar and shortening into an unnaturally colorless fluff. But today, we are adding a little bit of peanut butter which will hopefully make our starting mixture a little more colorful than mayonnaise.

After mixing everything together, it was the color of light honey. Even though we barely added enough peanut butter to lightly tint the the mixture, it had a surprisingly strong flavor .

Our dough was almost the same color as unbleached flour before we added any. 

I gave the it a final taste before baking, and had a few polite misgivings. This is the first time I actually measured the vanilla in who knows how long, and I already regretted my level teaspoon.

Now, I have previously mentioned that the Mirro cookie press has given me nothing but vexation. I may or may not have checked the listing details after a particularly bad experience to see if the seller takes returns. Well, I decided to give it one last chance before getting it back out of the house. I carefully followed every step in the directions (which I printed out so I could make very sure I was doing right), and this happened.

That's the end of the Mirro press in this house. They put some really good recipes on their instruction sheets, but I am not impressed with their products. (Well, I say that. I still like my Mirro percolator.)

I transferred the dough to our cheaper, flimsier press. Even though it feels like it could fall apart at any minute, I'm starting to call it "Old Reliable" because it always works. Instead of cursing at the cookie press, I could once again happily play with my kitchen toys. Peanut butter hearts sounded really cute, but they ended up looking kind of bad. However, unlike the Mirro press, every single cookie stayed where I put it.

Same dough, same pan, same room temperature. The only variable we changed was the press.

I really want to like this cheap press. It's easy to use, and it makes perfect cookies that actually stay where I squirt them. But every time I use it, it feels closer and closer to falling apart. However, it survived making an entire pan of peanut butter--- rings? flowers? I'm not sure what these are supposed to be. But whatever they are, they stuck to the pan and not the press.

As is rapidly becoming my way, I couldn't resist trying out the other shapes. The flowers came out really cute. Even what one of my friends has dubbed the "cosmic horror of boobs" stencil came out nicely (second from right, top and bottom rows). In full disclosure, I had to gently nudge some of the, um, nodules closer together after pressing them out. But, again, all of the cookie dough stayed where the press put it. You can't say that for certain other cookie presses that were sitting on the counter waiting to be hand-washed.

I found out that the segmented-ring cookies don't look very good when piled on a plate. They just look like a mound of cookie nubs. But (and I cannot say this enough) they are a mound of cookie nubs that released themselves from the cookie press without any problems.

These had nearly the same texture as Mexican wedding cookies. If you were to plunge them into powdered sugar right out of the oven, they would be fantastic. They were like extra-fine, very delicate shortbread.

Even though these cookies had a perfect texture, they were bland. They weren't tasteless, just underwhelming. If you feel the urge to make these, I suggest being a little more heavy-handed with the vanilla than the original recipe suggests.