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