With Christmas only twelve days away, I figured I would celebrate by bringing you a “Christmas Cookie of the Day” each day until December 25.  Simple enough plan, right?  Wrong!  Today, without warning I entered Spritz Hell, a land with no easy exit and no yummy treats.  A land where only desperate measures will result in any type of Christmas cookie.  A land of despair and sadness.  A land that I was lucky to escape with my wits intact.  This is a good thing, since I don’t have any wits to spare.

Considering that I wanted to present a cookie each day leading up to Christmas, I had no choice, but to hang in there and finish my Day One entry.  I did it and so can you.  If you dare, below is the recipe and harrowing tale of one baker’s journey into Spritz Hell.

SPRITZ FROM HELL

1 cup Shortening

¾ cup Sugar

1 Egg

1 teaspoon Peppermint Extract (this does provide a yummy flavor…  one of the only tried and true aspects of this cookie)

10 drops Green Food Coloring

2¼ cups Flour (as you will read, this might be too much flour and may have resulted in some of my troubles, but my Grandma Franck used this recipe and her cookies were great.  I have also used this recipe before without any troubles, so I’m still not sure what the issue was, but this is as good a place to lay blame as any)

½ teaspoon Baking Powder

¼ teaspoon Salt

Cinnamon Red Hot candies and colored sprinkles (these may help you cover up your pseudo disaster of a finished product)

Powdered Sugar and Milk to make some icing (another desperate attempt to cover up the finished product)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees (although as you will read later, I actually turned the temp down to 350 degrees in another desperate attempt to save this cookie).

Cream the shortening and sugar.

Mix in the egg, peppermint extract, and green food coloring.

Mix in the flour, baking powder, and salt.

Grab a cookie press and fill it with dough.

The initial recommendation was to press out Christmas tree shaped cookies, then I discovered that the plastic Christmas tree insert was broken.

Never fear, I would make wreathes.  I stuck in the insert and the cookie press began struggling horribly to produce any type of dough pattern.  It was a disaster.  I tried and tried and only got 23 wreath patterns to come out.

Figuring I would fix it by placing a decorative red hot on each wreath, I popped them in the oven for 8 minutes and returned to the dough to figure out what had went wrong.

I suspected that the dough was simply too thick for a press and was breaking the patterns.  I contemplated how to toss out the spritz concept and save the dough.  I had officially entered Spritz Hell survival mode.

Pulling the spritz cookie wreathes out of the oven, I discovered that red hot candies do not bake well.  They sort of melt in a hollowed out mountaintop fashion.  Not attractive, but my efforts did produce some acceptable wreath shaped cookies.  Not winning, but hanging in there.

My quickly prepared backup plan was to roll out the dough and make some cutout cookies in the shape of Christmas trees.  The problem I soon found out was that the dough, which was too thick for a press, was too thin to be rolled out.  Ugh, I could either (A) refrigerate the dough in hopes that would help make it “firmer” for rolling, but that would mean spending more time in Spritz Hell, (B) add more flour, but that seemed to be a solution that would result in a less tasteful cookie and even more time in Spritz Hell, or (C) gut it out and figure out how to roll out just a few more cookies and call it a day.  I decided to go with C, mainly because I felt it would be the quickest exit from Spritz Hell.  I prayed that I was right.

Sure enough the dough was difficult to handle and in general ornery, but I struggled through and cutout 18 Christmas tree shaped cookies.  Decorating them with colored sugar, I was somewhat pleased with the interim product.  This might work out.  I again prayed.

I turned the oven down to 350 degrees, since it seemed like a safer temp that would be less likely to burn the edges and leave a unfinished interior.  I popped the cookies into the oven.  I waited.

11 minutes later and somewhat to my surprise, the finished cookies looked pretty good.  Nowhere close to a Christmas tree spritz, but a fairly decent cutout cookie solution.

I pressed a red hot on the top of one of the trees and it did not stick.  Again thwarted by the red hot candies, I vowed not to bother with them for the rest of the night, after I ate a few more from the bag, as their punishment.

I whipped up some icing and further decorated the trees and looked at my finished product.  Not bad, I had survived my trip to Spritz Hell…  barely.  Only eleven days to go.  Pray for me.

 

Makes about 41 acceptable cookies, before you move onto less painful activities, such as burying your head in a snowbank.

Revised Source:  my normally trusty cookie cookbook, “Today is a Great Day for a Cookie,” which is available for free (good thing, because today this recipe was worthless) at www.CookiesbyDave.com.