Almost any cookie recipe you look at, the first step is always the same: cream together butter and sugar. At first it seems pretty simple, just mix the butter and sugar together until the mixture looks good enough, but leave it too long and the butter dissolves into a sticky mess making your cookies long, thin and crispy. And if you don’t whip it enough, your cookies remain hard pucks filled with the occasional butter pocket. So what does it take to make the perfect cookie? The answer is in the creaming of the butter and sugar. At home, I use a Kitchen Aide stand mixer, which makes easy work of an otherwise tedious job, but if you have to do it by hand, consider investing in a small electric mixer. When creaming the butter and sugar, make sure to have a spatula close at hand so you can make sure that the butter is cleaned off the edges of the bowl and that there are no solid bits. Look to cream the mixture until it changes from yellowish to a creamy white color, and the mixture looks thick and fluffy. If your creamed butter/sugar mix was the right consistency, you’ll see it in your cookies before you even put them in the oven; the dough will stick together just right without sticking to your hand or being runny. And after being baked for the appropriate amount of time, they will be pillowy and soft. Enjoy!

Cookie Review

Hannah Rosemurgy
Executive Editor

I was greeted with a pleasant surpirse when Ashley brough a batch of cookies to class one day. When she told me she had included a whipped butter instead, I was a bit surprised, since all of the online banking websites strictly advised not to use whipped. However, she then revealed that the butter was not itself whipped, rather, it’s creamed with a sprinkling of sugar to give it an airy consistency. The cookies were quite larger than a typical cookie, as it looked like the batter spread during the baking. This would be expected as a result of the creamed butter and sugar. The recipe is a nice spin off of the beloved Tollhouse cookie, but with a larger product. I’ll have to save this recipe for the books.