Welcome to The Cookie Monster, a blog about the most marvelous, versatile, and beloved bakeable item in the land: The cookie. You may see occassional forays into pies, bars, and other sweet treats, but my main focus is and has always been on the bite sized genius behind my very favorite snack. Happy Baking!

Friday, April 8, 2011

A Tale of Two Cookie Presses. Part 2

Happy Friday Blog-people! Tonight I took on part two of my cookie press comparison experiment with the press my mom got me for Christmas. It came in this fancy-schmancy carrying case.... Apparently it's a Kuhn Rikon, from Switzerland. Sounds fancy. It kind of looks like a weapon, don't you think?
Anyhoo, I decided to try a slightly different recipe. So I went with a "Chocolate Chip Spritz" cookie.


Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened

2/3 cup sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 egg

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup coarsely grated chocolate

2 1/4 flour

Mix up your dough by the usual process. I had to grate some semi sweet chocolate. At first the grate was too fine, so I nuked the chocolate in the microwave and it helped get more of a "course" texture.


Woops chocolate dust on the floor.


Mixed into the dough, the chocolate specks looked like little tiny chocolate chips. yum!


This dough was DELISH. I actually liked the dough better than the cookies. Haha. It tastes just like the dough in cookie dough ice cream. I was tempted to roll up some little balls of it and mix it in some vanilla....future project perhaps.



Enter the Swiss cookie press....


This thing actually had a "trigger" type apparatus, which measures out the amount of dough for you. For a novice cookie-presser, I think this was simpler (instead of trying to figure out the best amount of dough for each press.




However, I did have some trouble with it. Because of the smaller amount of dough it allowed through the press at once, I kept getting incomplete cookies. Slightly annoying...


After a while though, I got the hang of it, and made some pretty flowers...



Bake at 400 degrees for 5 minutes. these cookies were less doughy and smaller than those from the pampered chef press, so the bake time was quick. I actually had a few burn victims.




Powdered sugar sprinkle, and we're done!


Both of these presses have their pros and cons. I think the pampered chef version, although a little less "high-tech" allows for a little more control and variation, which I think will be better once I'm more practiced at this whole "cookie-pressing" skill. The Swiss version is cookie pressing for dummies, which actually would have been better for round 1 I think.


Pampered chef: bigger cookies. Swiss: more delicate cookies.....


I guess it just depends on the mood. I'm sure I will use both in the future. They're both good products and made two yummy batches of treats!


Happy baking and happy weekend!

-S

3 comments:

  1. I highly enjoy the literary reference in the titles of these two posts. Go Dickes! Perhaps you could continue that theme? Catcher in the Pie cookies? Lord of the Fillings?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Um, my previous comment says "Dickes" instead of Dickens - CAN WE MODIFY THAT PLEASE!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. HAHAHAHA classic. p.s.....LOVE Lord of the FIllings. I could make it a three part series. oh the possibilities!

    ReplyDelete