Butter Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the best butter for butter cookies? ›

The best butter for your baked goods depends on what type of recipe you're whipping up. Unsalted, American-style butter works well in goods like cookies, pound cakes and pancakes that require the high-fat content of conventional butter and more flexibility with salt and flavor content.

Similar to shortbread cookies, they are very popular around the holidays and are often given as Christmas cookie gifts. Traditionally, butter cookies are made with very simple ingredients: flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract.

Open up the oven, pull out the rack a bit, and push the sides of the cookie very lightly with a spatula or your finger. If the edge stays firm and doesn't fall inwards, then your cookies are done. If you leave a noticeable indentation, then your cookies likely need a few minutes more in the oven.

Butter is an emulsifier and it makes cookies tender. It also adds in the crispy-around-the-edges element. Adding too much butter can cause the cookies to be flat and greasy. Adding too little butter can cause the cookies to be tough and crumbly.

Cabot Creamery's salted butter won the top prize in its category with 99.65 points, a near-perfect score. The Vermont company narrowly beat out a French butter that costs two to three times the price. Cabot Creamery is a New England farmer cooperative, making the brand easy to love.

With butter cookies, you really do need to use a lot of butter (hence the name!), and sugar too, so they're not healthy in any shape or form. However, they are gluten-free and vegan, so perfect for those of you with gluten or dairy allergies. They can also be made nut-free by omitting the hazelnuts.

Bakery or homemade cookies can be stored at room temperature two to three weeks or two months in the refrigerator. Cookies retain their quality when stored in the freezer for eight to 12 months. Moist bars, such as cheesecake and lemon bars, can be refrigerated for seven days.

Make sure that the liquid you add is room temperature.

Adding cream or milk makes the batter slightly softer and easier to pipe - make sure that it is room temperature or it will chill the butter and still be hard to pipe.

Overmixing the dough

If you overmix the dough, the cookies will be dry and crumbly. The best way to fix this is to add more liquid to the dough. This can be done by adding milk, water, or even melted butter. You may also need to add more flour to the dough if it is too wet.

The ingredients you use and how you shape your cookies both play an important role in whether your cookies turn out crispy or chewy. The type of flour and sugar you use, if your cookie dough contains eggs, and whether you use melted or softened butter all factor into the crispy-chewy equation, too.

Why did my butter cookies flatten? ›

OVEN IS TOO HOT

Oven temperatures are a crucial factor in baking. If your cookies consistently come out flat, you may have selected the wrong baking temperature. If you bake cookies using too much heat, the fats in the dough begin to melt before the other ingredients can cook together and form your cookie's rise.

Due to its liquid nature, using oil in cookies typically results in a denser texture. Also, because oil is 100% fat, it doesn't react with flour the way butter does (butter contains water). Because of that, your cookies won't be as fluffy. If you're a fan of flat cookies, then using oil is an excellent option.

Too much butter makes cookies turn out just as you'd expect: very buttery. This batch of cookies was cakey in the middle, but also airy throughout, with crispy edges. They were yellow and slightly puffy in the middle, and brown and super thin around the perimeter.

A lower-quality butter has more water content, which will produce, for example, a crisper, flatter cookie with more crunch. Using a higher quality butter will make for softer, chewier cookies with a taller shape.

The best butter for baking is unsalted butter. Whether that unsalted butter comes in sweet cream, European-style, organic, grass-fed, cultured, plant-based, Amish, or browned butter, any of these options that remain unsalted are great for baking.

Since the concept of squeeze spread isn't new, we found a way to make LAND O LAKES^® Soft Squeeze^™ butter spread stand out: It contains real butter.