Butter Cookies: What are they?

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Butter cookies are a simple dessert made with quality butter, powdered sugar, and sifted flour. They can be cut into various shapes with cookie cutters and topped with granulated sugar. The high butter content causes them to brown and rise easily. They are often decorated with colorful icings and candies.

Butter Cookies are a shortbread-style dessert cookie. Sometimes called sugar cookies for another prominent ingredient, butter cookies are a very simple and easy baked dessert to make. Most butter cookie recipes are simple to fully characterize the flavor of quality butter. Bakers often cut raw butter cookie dough into a variety of shapes with cookie cutters. It is common for butter cookies to be topped with clear or colored varieties of granulated sugar to add sparkle and extra sweetness.

With so few ingredients in the cookie recipe, each one plays a big part in the overall result. Dairy fresh unsalted butter gives a rich taste to cookies. Quality dry products such as powdered sugar and sifted flour affect the texture of the biscuits. Some recipes call for a few drops of real vanilla extract for added depth of flavor.

There are numerous varieties of cookie cutters available to form butter cookie dough into almost any shape. The dough is rolled into an evenly thin sheet on a clean, flat surface with a rolling pin. Flour or confectioner’s sugar is usually sprinkled around the edges of the cookie cutter to prevent them from sticking to the moist dough. The dough between the molded cookies is removed so it can be rolled out for the next batch. Butter biscuits of various shapes and sizes require different cooking times in the oven.

The high butter content causes the cookies to brown and rise more easily from the pan. Raw butter cookie dough can usually be dropped directly onto the baking sheet without the need for shortening or spraying with cooking oil. The saturated butter flour in cookies reacts to the heat of the oven and releases its moisture quickly. Butter Cookies have a crunchy crunch once they’re lightly browned and have had time to cool. Substituting half the butter for vegetable shortening results in a chewy cookie with a less buttery flavor.

Cookie decorators routinely use butterscotch cookie shapes as an edible blank canvas. The basic buttery flavor of the cookies goes well with a wide variety of sweet decorations. Custom butter cookie creations are often decorated with colorful icings and candies to celebrate a particular holiday or event. Shortbread cookies that are decorated while still warm from the oven can become soggy as the frosting seals in their residual moisture.




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