Almond Spritz Cookies

1. 01 Introduction: Welcome to this class. In this class, I will teach you how to make these almond spritz cookies. First, I will teach you how to make the cookie dough. Next, I will teach you how to use the cookie press to form the cookies. Then I will teach you how to sprinkle on the sugars and sprinkles. Finally, I will teach you how to bake and cool the cookies. I am a self taught baker. Many years ago, I decided I wanted to open up my own home bakery. Part of this bakery was go into farmers markets, festivals and making treats for special occasions. These cookies are excellent to sell at the festivals and farmers markets. I had this business for several years until my husband got a job offer in a different city. We made the move, and I closed my business. Now here in the new city, I do not want to open up another home business. But I still love baking. And as a retired teacher, I love teaching. So I have decided to share my skills with you on skill share. This class is aimed at the baker that would like to learn how to make the traditional almond spritz cookie. I'm excited to teach you the skills of this class. Let's move on to Lesson number one. Making the cookie dough. 2. 02 Making the Dough: After all time. We are ready to start making our almond spritz pressed cookies. Let me show you how we make the dough. I want to add the butter and sugar to the bulk. And I want to mix it. I want to start on a very low speed while the butter gets broken up and the sugar gets mixed in. Once the sugar is pretty mixed in, so it won't fly out. I'm going to change it to medium speed, and I want to cream the butter. And that could be about two to 3 minutes to get it to that. Okay. You can see that looks light and fluffy. Now, I want to scrape my bowl down before I add the next ingredients. I'm going to add now the egg and my almond extract and that I want three quarters of a teaspoon. So that's a half a teaspoon and one quarter of teaspoon. I want to beat this on a low speed, and I just want to mix it in. With the speed still low. I'm going to add the flour, my almond meal or almond flour and my salts. We just want to get them incorporated. Then we're going to turn it off and I want to scrape this down again. This dough is now ready to go into the cookie press and be formed into our cookies. 3. 03 Using the Cookie Press: We're ready to put the cookie dough into the cookie press. The cookie press is just the cylinder with all the other parts. I'm going to take this end and I'm going to put a snowflake stencil in there and then screw it to one end. Then I want to take my dough and put it in there. I wanted to go all the way down. So I'm going to try. I'm using a small spoon so I can get it to go inside and I can use a spoon to push it down. You'll see I'm just using my spoon. To push it down before I add more. When I say small spoon, I'm just talking about your regular teaspoon that comes with your place settings. When you make the dough, you're going to get more than enough to feel this. You're going to feel this more than once. Don't worry about trying to cram it all in there. Now I'm going to screw. Let's get that lined up better. I want to screw that on, but doesn't screw correctly, realign it. And there we have one that formed without me pushing the dough. Let me scrape that off because I don't know if it's in the right place. Now I'm going to take my cookie press and put it on the cookie sheet, and I just go push down once and I have my cookie. I just put the next one right next to it, push down again, and I have my cookie. I'm just going to keep doing that. Till either the pan is full or I run out of dough with this particular load. I'm getting down to the end of my dough. I'm going to quit there. You notice that one actually has a hole in the middle because I'm almost out of dough. For the snowflakes, I'm going to use these rainbow sprinkles. I just want to get a up the cookie and sprinkle them with these rainbow sprinkles. So is going to go on the cookie sheet, and that's okay. As you can see, My cookie sheet is not full. I'm going to slide this off to the side for just a moment, before I fail my cookie press, I'm going to change this stencil for a different one. I'm going to see how our angel comes out. I have not used all these stencils because these Christmas stencils are new this year. Now, I also need to unscrew my cookie press, pull that out and pull that up and then fill my cookie press with more dough. With that field, I'm just going to do the same that I did with the first one. Make sure that's lined up. And then screw it on. Take that plastic off from the bottom. Bring my kiki sheet back over. Put that right there. I don't know if it looks like an angel. That one looks more like an angel. I got to take that one off. It looks more like the angel. Okay, the angel doesn't always come out looking like an angel. Now, with the angel one, I'm going to use this multi colored sugar to sprinkle on top. These are now ready to go into the oven. In our next lesson, I will show you how to bake and cool our cookies. 4. 04 Baking and Cooling: We are ready to bake our cookies. Our oven has preheated to 350 degrees. We will be cooking our cookies 12-17 minutes. I will start checking at 12 minutes, which I think will be plenty of time. This is our oven. You'll notice that the rack is in the middle. We're just going to place our cookies on that rack and set our timer for 12 minutes. We'll be back in 12 minutes when the timer goes off. Our oven is about ready to beep. So let's take a look and see if they're done. There's our timer. Let's lift. Oh. As I said, I thought 12 minutes was more than enough, and you can see those are definitely overcooked. So for these ones that I put in, I'm going to take it down to Actually 8 minutes, which is more what these kind of cookies cook for and see what that looks like. We will go ahead and put these ones up to cool. Our timer is about ready to go off on our next batch of cookies. We'll look at it and hopefully, it won't be overcooked, like the first batch, and then we'll still have some good ones for eating. The dou for this, I was actually able to fill my cookie press up three different times. So as the timer goes off lit, look at the second batch of cookies. There is our timer. As I said, this was said for 8 minutes. And when you look at these, it's just starting to brown on the edges, and that's what we're looking for. So here's our kicks, we're just going to very carefully take them off the pan. Now, as I look at these cookies, they didn't really hold their shape as well as I wanted them to. It's hard to tell what shape they are. So if I were to make them again, I would probably add just a bit more flour so that they would be firmer and not spread as much but keep their shape because that's what happened as they spread and as they spread, they lost their shape. But they're still going to taste great and you're still going to enjoy them. But if you want them to have that shape, then you're going to want to add a little bit more flour. If you look at my other recipes for sprich cookies, which are other flavor, You'll see that those cookies kept their shape better, and that's probably because the flower was more like the ratio we wanted it to be. But even with that, these are going to be really good to eat. Now, I just want to make sure they're all turned over and spread out so that they can cool. There you have your almond spritz cookies. 5. 05 Final Thoughts: Now. Thank you for taking this class. We had fun making our almond spritz cookies. We first learned how to make the cookie dough. We then formed the cookie and sprinkled the sugar and sprinkles on top. We finished by baking our cookies and then letting them cool. My cookies flattened out more than they should have. So I would suggest that you put just a little bit more flour like a half a cup into your cookie recipe. And, of course, as we were bacon, we discovered you only needed about six to 7 minutes, not the 12 that the recipe called for. So please cut down your baking time so that you don't get cookies that look like this. I hope your cookies turned out the way you wanted them to. Your project for this class is to make these almond spritz cookies. The recipe is in the project section. Please make sure you upload a picture of your cookies and let us know how it went. I look forward to hearing from you from my kitchen to your kitchen, happy baking. S.