Danish Butter Cookies by The Gardening Foodie

Danish Butter Cookies - made December 21, 2022 from The Gardening Foodie 

1/2 cup butter, room temperature (remove butter from refrigerator at least an hour before)

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup cake flour or all-purpose flour

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together butter, powdered sugar and vanilla extract until light and fluffy, 5-8 minutes.
2. Scrape down sides of mixing bowl, add flour in 3 additions, 1/3 cup at a time, mixing after each addition until combined.
3. Transfer for the dough to a sheet of plastic wrap and roll into a log. Cut a hole in one end of the plastic wrap and place into a piping bag fitted with a star tip (I used Wilton 1M).
4. Pipe the dough onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Cover with plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
5. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Sprinkle coarse sugar over chilled piped cookies before placing in oven. Bake for 15 minutes or until edges of cookies turn a light golden color. Remove from oven and let rest on baking sheets for 5 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool completely.

dough after mixing original recipe ingredients

dough after several tablespoons of milk and a little extract vanilla added

I hate to end the year on a down note but let's just consider it an honest one. Every so often, I have a baking fail. I don't count the last few months when tried and true recipes made the way I've always made them, with fresh ingredients, baked from frozen dough, oven temp is verified, etc, have been coming out flat (butter, you're the problem). I'm talking epic fail. Okay, maybe not as epic as the time I tried to make fudge the old-fashioned way without the help of marshmallow fluff or sweetened condensed milk.

I'm not sure where I went wrong with this recipe. I followed the instructions exactly, even to the point where I left the butter out to soften longer than the recipe prescribed and it still wasn't that soft but it wasn't that hard either and was fairly easy to beat in my stand mixer. I beat the butter, powdered sugar and vanilla extract for 7 minutes but it was still stiff and not light and fluffy. Nevertheless I forged on and added the powdered sugar and cake flour (not all-purpose) as the original blogger said they always use cake flour.

Result? A stiff dough I could've probably rolled out and cut out with cookie cutters or stamped. That wouldn't be so bad except this dough was supposed to be soft and malleable enough to pipe. Um, no. So I added several splashes of whole milk and mixed again. Added more vanilla extract and kept on mixing. Still no. I finally gave up since I didn't want to change the composition of how the cookie was supposed to bake or taste and decided I could live with stamped cookies instead of piped cookies. I rolled the dough into small balls and stamped them. Then I froze them before baking to make sure the impressions held.

The baked result was disappointing. I think part of that was my fault in that I didn't bake the first batch long enough. The cookies were dense and powdery. Not even that butter flavored. I baked the second batch longer. Better but still blah. No crisp texture, very little butter flavor. It just tasted powdery. So, again, not sure where I went wrong but this cookie isn't for me.