Jam Heart Butter Cookies - Simply Scratch (2024)

FAQs

How do you shape a cookie into a heart without a cookie cutter? ›

Heart Shaped Cookies Without Cookie Cutters

First, chill the dough for 20-30 minutes to make it easy to work with. Then take 1-2 tablespoons of cookie dough and flatten it on a baking tray, molding it with your hands into a long and skinny heart shape to allow for spreading while baking.

Melted butter is best suited for drop doughs such as chocolate chip, peanut butter, and sugar cookies, as well as most cookie bars. You can usually adapt recipes that don't originally call for melted butter to use this technique if you're looking for an even fudgier texture.

You can use a fork or a dough docker to prick small holes all over the surface of the dough. By venting the steam, docking keeps the dough from billowing or heaving as it bakes. It's an important step for crisp cookies or that are baked all in a single sheet and not cut up until they come out of the oven.

Chill the Cookie Dough

This is my number one tip, if you do nothing else, do this step! Chilling your cookie dough is the single biggest piece of advice I give people to stop their sugar cookies spreading too much.

Roll the dough up into a log tightly. Shape the log so that there are three sides. Take the back-end of a knife and run it down the middle of one of the sides to make the groove for the heart's top. Using your hands shape the two rounded tops and make any final adjustments to get a nice heart shape.

Popping your dough in the fridge allows the fats to cool. As a result, the cookies will expand more slowly, holding onto their texture. If you skip the chilling step, you're more likely to wind up with flat, sad disks instead of lovely, chewy cookies. Cookies made from chilled dough are also much more flavorful.

Firm dough prevents the cookies from spreading too much, which is why chilling the dough is a crucial step for cut-out and rolled cookies. "The colder and more solid the fat is, the less the cookie will spread," says food stylist and recipe developer Caitlin Haught Brown.

In cookies, softened butter will result in a cakier and airier cookie than using melted butter. This is due to the fact that softened butter will create air bubbles that expand in the oven during baking. Melted butter will make your cookies delightfully dense on the inside and crisp on the edges.

The main reason TO beat an egg before adding it is that the mixture to which you are adding is not going to be sufficiently mixed afterwards to hom*ogenize the egg. That is, if you are adding the egg and then just "stirring gently", that's not going to be enough to beat the egg.

What is this? Wet a paper towel, wipe the bottom of a glass, dip in colored sugar, then press on cookie dough ball and flatten. Fun to do with kids! Bake until edges are golden brown.

What causes butter bleed in sugar cookies? ›

This is caused by butter bleed. This means that the butter (fat) from the cookie has seeped into the icing, leaving dark spots on the surface. This happens to me when I try to bake and decorate my cookies on the same day (not sure why!). So I always bake my cookies at least the day before I decorate.

Room temperature butter is just the right consistency to incorporate air when it's creamed with sugar. These trapped air pockets result in risen, fluffy cookies. If the butter is any warmer, it won't incorporate enough air and your cookies will have less rise.

Baking powder simply adds carbon dioxide to the equation, providing a more forceful pressure that encourages a dough to spread up and out. Without the well-developed elasticity of a bread dough, the strands of gluten in cookies would sooner snap than stretch, cracking along the surface.

No Problem. Even if you don't have a box full of fun holiday cookie cutters, that doesn't mean you can't enjoy cute cut-out cookies on your holiday table. A standard drinking glass with about a 3-inch opening is a great stand-in for cookie cutters.

Roll the balls of cookie dough between your palms

After you've used your scoop to form all your balls of dough, take each ball and smooth it out by rolling it between the palms of your hands. This ensures you don't end up with any craggly cookies.

Another option is using a pastry bag or ziploc bag with a corner snipped off. A squeeze bottle works too, if you have one handy! When your pan is hot, just drip, pipe, or squeeze the outline of a heart, then fill in the outline as quick as you can with batter.