**NOTE 11-8-19**
Our new streamlined website is finally up! Get creative this Holiday Season with our 28 unique sets of Cookie Press Disks & the new Impress! Cookie Press. Learn with our recipe tutorials & decorating blog, with expert advice & troubleshooting tips. The press & all of our disk sets are ready for purchase now! Happy Baking! ~Susie the Disk Designer www.impressbakeware.com
Our products are also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Impress+Bakeware&ref=bl_dp_s_web_0
Read here about our new cookie press and 5 new disk sets: https://creativecookiepress.com/2019/11/05/were-back-meet-our-new-disks-and-press/
Original February 5, 2018 Post:
Celebrate the opening and closing ceremonies & everything in between with yummy gold, silver, & bronze medal cookies! Use the Flag, Star, & “USA” disks to bake up some Patriotic Spritz Cookies to celebrate the 2018 winter Olympics! Go team USA!
Our new Medal Disk will be part of the Celebrate Disk Set which will come out later this spring, but we decided to debut it early for the Olympics. 🙂 (*Note: available now in 2019. Link at bottom of page.)
(*NOTE: As of our 2019 Re-Opening our new disks are made of a solid white material, but the designs are exactly the same, and press identically.)
For this project I used one of my easiest spritz recipes. It’s quick to make and easy to press. I tinted the dough red and blue and used simple decorating techniques with icing, edible pearlescent dust, and some edible glittery stars.
Here’s how!
Vanilla Powdered Sugar Spritz
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, softened (not melted) I always suggest using Land O Lakes butter, as I know it will consistently cream well. Some generic butters result in a very stiff dough!
1 3/4 cups plus 2 Tablespoons powdered sugar
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
GEL food coloring (NOT liquid)
Preheat oven to 400°F.
makes about 110 cookies
In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside.
Cream the butter well. The foundation of perfect melt-in-your-mouth, light and airy spritz cookies is a super-creamed butter. I use an electric mixer and set it on the highest setting. Pretend you’re making buttercream frosting. Add the sugar and cream it again.
Then add the vanilla extract, creaming once more.
Add the flour mixture on a lower speed until it is all well-combined and the flour is fully and evenly incorporated and a soft dough forms. Perfect spritz dough has a soft malleable texture that is not too sticky or too stiff.
Divide your dough into 3 parts. Tint one part blue and one part red with GEL food coloring. Liquid color tends to change the consistency of the dough so use a gel. Add a little at a time, as you can always add more but you can’t take it out. I use toothpicks or the tip of a knife. Use your hands to knead the color in. Make enough of each color to do whichever types of cookies you want in whatever colors you wish.
Press onto clean, un-greased cookie sheets using a consistent rhythm. If your dough isn’t pressing well, troubleshoot by adding flour (a tablespoon at a time) to overly soft or sticky dough, or water (a tablespoon at a time) to overly stiff dough. This should be a very easy-to-press dough. It’s not uncommon for the first few shapes to come out mis-shapen or have trouble sticking. Pressure has to build up in the barrel for the cookies to come out consistently. Once you’ve got a good shape, try to press in a consistent rhythm.
The medals have an open circle design. This allows the medal circles to have a nice clean even shape. They look kind of cool with the 3D relief of the ring, but if you prefer a smoother look they can be flattened.
Simply push inward on the side of the ring from one side, then then other, then upward from the bottom. Then use a wet finger tip to smooth the surface flat. See the video if that’s a little confusing!
Bake for 6 to 10 minutes, checking early and often as all ovens are different. Bake until they barely begin to brown o the edges. Let them sit for 3 to 4 minutes to cool slightly then move to a wire rack.
To make Flag shaped cookies using the Flag Disk DO NOT press directly on to the cookie sheet. To form the Flag shape, extrude dough while holding your press up in the air, disk side down, allowing a ridged ribbon of dough to flow out through the disk. Use one to one and a half slow steady clicks (in one-click-per-cookie type presses, for twist presses visually gauge the flag size as the ribbon forms). Once the dough is extruded, gently use your finger to help the dough to break from the disk and lay the dough flat on the cookie sheet, ridges-side-up.
Then use a knife edge or spatula end to make then ends straight and clean. This can also be done after baking, using a gentle sawing motion with a sharp knife to clean up the ends. See the video if this is confusing!
The USA’s and Stars are straightforward to press. Try to keep the USA’s small and if you want pointier stars, just pinch the tips a bit with your fingers.
To decorate, Use red, white, and blue decorating icing. I saved time and used store-bought icing in a tube and used star and round decorating tips. Several brands make pearlescent dust, this time I used Wilton® Pearl Dust™ in sapphire blue, bronze, silver, and gold. I also used their decorating icing in royal blue, red, and white, and their edible stars. Find with cake decorating supplies at Wal Mart, Hobby Lobby, Michaels, etc, or online.
For the Flags, use a wide round tip like #5 (# 3 would be ok) to pipe white stripes on the flags. Simply follow the grooves! Put three white stripes on the bottom and 3 partial stripes on the top. Start and stop each stripe off the edges of the cookies and then cut them clean to the edge with a toothpick. Pipe a blue square and fill it in with icing, then us a damp finger tip to smooth it out, sprinkling the stars on the the still-wet icing.
For the USA’s, use a food safe decorating brush to brush the dust onto the cookie. No water is needed, as the buttery texture of the cookies is a good surface for the dust to adhere to. It will stick just fine! Brush it on and smear it around to achieve the look you want. I add it just because it makes the 3D words really pop and gives some fun sparkle.
For the medals, use star tips (I used # 16) to pipe on red, white and blue icing onto the neck ribbon, starting on the outside with red, outside of the ridge on the cookie. Then pipe the white onto the ridge itself, then the blue inside the ridge. Then brush the gold, silver, and bronze dust onto the medals.
Experiment with icing the stars. I’m sure a lot of you are even more creative than I am, so come up with your own designs for these cookies to make them really pop! Maybe outline the stars with dots, or make them red, white, and blue by putting all three dough colors in the barrel together like a tie-dye. There are so many possibilities to get creative.
That’s all there is to this pretty simple bake. Have fun with it. 🙂
Here’s to a fun, safe Olympics for all the athletes! May it be a time of good sportsmanship and good memories for us all.
As always, Happy Baking!
~Susie
Disk Designer/Co-Owner at Impress! Bakeware, LLC
“Get creative with your cookie press!”
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The Patriotic & Fourth of July and Celebrate Disk Sets:
https://www.impressbakeware.com/products/patriotic-8-disk-set-for-cookie-presses
https://www.impressbakeware.com/products/celebrate-8-disk-set-for-cookie-presses
**NOTE 11-8-19**
Our new streamlined website is finally up! Get creative this Holiday Season with our 28 unique sets of Cookie Press Disks & the new Impress! Cookie Press. Learn with our recipe tutorials & decorating blog, with expert advice & troubleshooting tips. The press & 12 other disk sets are ready for purchase now, & more will be available as they come in stock! Happy Baking! ~Susie the Disk Designer www.impressbakeware.com
Our products are also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Impress+Bakeware&ref=bl_dp_s_web_0
Read here about our new cookie press and 5 new disk sets: https://creativecookiepress.com/2019/11/05/were-back-meet-our-new-disks-and-press/
creative cookie press 