Macaroons & Spritz Cookies

I thought Week 5 was going to be a difficult week for me because we had to make Coconut Macaroons because I do not like shredded coconut. At all. I dreaded having to eat one because just the thought of a mouth full of shredded coconut makes me shudder. After all, my earliest childhood memory is of getting sick after eating a cake decorated with shredded coconut. But I did my best, and I made some nice looking (and I’m told tasting) macaroons. I DID actually try one because we have to describe the taste and mouthfeel in our report. I actually liked the flavor (I do like coconut flavor, just not the shredded stuff) but the mouthfeel was disgusting. Like eating fingernails. Blech! Anyway, I survived what I had thought would be the most difficult week of Baking 101. Little did I know another challenge faced me in Week 6.

Week 6 focused on what are known as Pressed Cookies or Bagged Cookies. They’re called this because the dough is soft and the cookies are made up by using either a cookie press or a piping bag.

The most famous of these is the Spritz Cookie. The name Spritz comes from the German word Spritzen, meaning to squirt because the dough is pressed for “squirted” through cookie press or bag. The cookie is a basic butter cookie and the actual German name for the cookie is Spritzgebäck – meaning Shortbread. They’re different, however, from typical shortbread.

Shortbread has the highest ration of butter to flour (and is baked at a lower temperature) and therefore is usually crumbly. Spritz cookies also have a high proportion of butter, but the flour and sugar are also increased (and is baked at a higher temperature) and this allows the cookie to hold its shape better than shortbread.

Spritz cookies are a Christmas tradition with many families and you may recognize Spritz cookies as those cookies you see in the big blue tin every Christmas. The cookies are shaped to look like Christmas Trees, wreaths, and other shapes and often sprinkled with sugar or a glacé cherry. Usually they’re made by using a cookie press (a type of “gun” that is loaded with the dough which is then pressed through a disc of varying shape). In class, however, we were not allowed to use a press. No, we had to use a piping bag. I figured that wouldn’t be too difficult. I’ve used a piping bag before so all I would really need to do is concentrate of forming the shape neatly.

Simple.

Yeah. Simple. I never had more trouble making a cookie before in my life! I should have known it was not going to be easy when I first started piping the cookies. They piped easy enough, but they were barely holding their shape. The dough seemed awfully thin. But what did I know? I piped out two trays and when I turned to put them in the freezer to allow them to set, I noticed something on the counter near the mixer. It was a bowl. And in the bowl? Flour. I forgot to incorporate the flour into the batter! Talk about a butter cookie! What I piped onto the trays was nothing but butter and sugar! Wouldn’t I be surprised when I took them out of the oven after baking! So, back into the mixing bowl everything went, INCLUDING the flour this time.

I found myself wishing I had not discovered the flour. Good grief! After adding the flour, the dough was nearly impossible to work with. It was so stiff that I could barely get it to come out of the piping bag! I used the largest star tip that I had and applied as much squeezing pressure as I could and it barely moved. I tried piping rosettes but ended up with big rings. It was the best I could do!

I tried using another tip, one called a “Sultan” (because the shape it makes is similar to a Sultan’s turban) but the dough would not budge through that tip at all. I tried another shape, to try to get a flat rectangular cookie with ridges and that one surprisingly worked well.

I put these into the freezer and decided to make a second batch because I was convinced the first batch could not be correct. But no…it was correct. The second batch was actually more difficult to work with.

I froze the cookies for a few hours so that they would hold their shape when I baked them. When I took the cookies out of the oven I was stunned to see that they had completely flattened and spread out! They only held their shape in that they were still round. I immediately took photos and sent the before and after baking photos to my instructor in a near panic asking what went wrong. Imagine my shock when she wrote back and said that they were perfectly fine! I didn’t believe her. How could they be? She called me (I assume to talk me in off the ledge) and said that, based on the way I had piped them, they turned out correctly. She said she could still see the ridges made by the star tip I had used and they were decorated nicely so there was no problem with submitting them for my project. And they did taste very good!

I should have known that these cookies would not go the way I expected them to. I've really never had good experiences with them. While most people think of Christmas when they hear of a Spritz cookie, I think of Italy. When I was growing up, my father's mother, who was from Italy, used to have Spritz cookies in her cookie jar - the ones shaped like a star with a cherry in the middle. I always liked those cookies! In 1995, I visited Italy for a couple weeks. The day before I was to leave Italy to continue my vacation in Germany, I was in the town of Lucca, just outside Pisa. I walked past a bakery and saw that they had the Spritz cookies like my grandmother used to have! I figured I would buy some since I had a long, 10-hour train ride the next day. They would be a nice snack to have on the train.

I went in and in my wonderfully butchered Italian, I asked the lady behind the counter for some. Apparently, I didn't say "some" correctly. She put some on a little tray on the scale, looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. She added a few more layers, looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. By the time we were done smiling at each other, I had almost two kilos of Spritz cookies! Well, it was going to be a long train ride so I paid the lady and left. The next day, I got on the train, and as we were making our way north through the Tuscan countryside I decided it was time to have a snack. I carefully untied the nice bow she put on the wrapped package of cookies (she apparently thought they were a gift), took out a cookie, thought back to the cookies my grandmom used to have, took a bite....and spit it out! They were the most disgusting cookies I ever ate!

I should have realized that sometimes past IS prologue. Oh well...I did earn an “A” for my Spritz cookies, even though I still don’t really like the way they turned out. But everyone else, including my instructor, said they looked great and those that tried them enjoyed the cookies and that’s what really matters. When I started out with this week’s project, I had hoped to rival the “blue tin” cookies, but it looks like their business is safe!