Thursday, June 17, 2010

Chocolate Butter Cookies




After yesterday's post on Evil Italian Butter Cookies, I had some serious reflection on the fact that I would love to see a chocolate version of the delicate piped cookie. So, we set to work here and altered just a few ingredients on the original version by Joanne. Here's what we came up with for that chocolate version. I hope you enjoy them as much as we have.
My Chocolate Butter Cookies
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening (Spectrum makes a nice organic shortening...)
1/2 cups granulated sugar, pulsed 2 minutes in a spice or coffee grinder
1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/3 cup baking cocoa
2 tsp LorAnn buttery sweet dough emulsion
1/3 cup egg yolks
Directions:
Cream together the softened butter, shortening, sugar, emulsion and egg yolks until very light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Sift the flour, cornstarch and cocoa through a sifter and add to the cream mixture. Stir well. Pre heat oven to 375 degrees. Place parchment paper on a cookie sheet and pipe the cookie batter through a very large star tip in a 2 inch circle or in a zig-zag design, leaving one inch between cookies. Bake 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool on sheet pan and then decorate as desired. We added chocolate chips to some. Others we dusted with a rose petal and orange-vanilla infused sugar. Both where heavenly.
Once cool, store in an air tight container. Anyone want to come take some of these off my hands? They are staring at me right now and I don't know how much longer I can stay on my diet. EEEEK! What was I thinking adding chocolate to the already evil butter cookies?!
Oh yes...if you think of it, go check out our Upcoming Giveaway! You know you want a Paula Deen cast iron covered casserole (it's amazing)!

There you go.

8 comments:

Joanne said...

Brava! If there's a way to make anything better, it's with chocolate! They look scrummy! How did the changes affect the sandy-ness?

Chef Tess said...

The changes added to the sandy texture for me. The yolk instead of all egg did too, because of the higher fat content.

Mama Peck said...

These look amazing! I love butter cookies anyway and then to add chocolate..my all time favorite food group..? Oh, My!

Joanne said...

I tried these and they are wonderful! The texture was indeed great.I didn't realize that just egg yolk would be so good. The only change I made was because I didn't have the Lorann butter emulsion, so I sent in vanilla and almond extracts to pinch hit. Highly recommend trying this!

Chef Tess said...

Hooray!! Thanks Joanne!

pjcim said...

I need to try these as well.
Thanx for the recipe. ;)

pjcim said...

Hello everyone,
I have a question, I too have been looking Hi ~ lo for this Italian Butter Cookie (just like the Italian bakery we still go to) for these cookes. So my question is:
*you stated that you liked 3/4 c. conf sugar & 1/4 c gran sugar. is this an "addition" to the recipe for the sand cookies. I am so anxious to try this recipe this weekend. Thanx P.J.

Chef Tess said...

Nope that is in place of the full amount of granulated sugar. XoXo! Great question.