"butter cookies" news and stories

Get this butter cookie recipe along with many others after the jump.

• When it comes to baking cookies, butter makes all the difference.
• Rocco DiSpirito was once one of most talented and fastest rising chefs out there. Now he's something of a food world joke. What happened?
• American chef Daniel Rose has become a hit with his Parisian restaurant Spring.
• Frank Bruni reviews Sucession and finds it confusing and sadly wanting.
• Looking for a gift for a wine lover on your list? How about one of the new crop of wine books?
• Holiday baking inevitably leads to leftover egg whites. Take that surfeit and make meringue cookies!
• For a succulent pot roast, try using flanken.
• Celebrate Christmas with the iconic Elizabeth David whispering in your ear via her posthumously released book.
• Italian chef G. Franco Romangnoli has died. He and his wife were hosts of one of the very first cooking shows devoted to Italian cookery.

The holiday season can be a hectic and overwhelming time of the year, but it's always nice to take a couple of hours to make up a batch of roll-out butter cookies. They're a little fussy in the making, but frosted with a quick powdered sugar glaze (powdered sugar dissolved in a little water and flavored with a dash of vanilla extract), they make an elegant addition to a holiday table and are sure to delight anyone you give them to.

I posted my favorite sugar/butter cookie recipe last year and it's the one I use for these types of cookies. I like to use smaller cutters for cookies that I'm going to give away, because them mean that you can get more cookies out of each roll and they look more delicate and appealing. To glaze, I make a small bowl of the frosting I described above and then quickly dip the top of the cookie into it. Let the glaze harden completely before stacking, otherwise they'll stick together and will lose the beauty and elegance you've worked so hard to create.

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Last night, my boyfriend came home with a box of Entenmann's Valentine's Day-themed Holiday Butter Cookies. In recent years, as I found my footing as a baker, I've become scornful of mass-produced, packaged cookies, assuming that anything I could make in my own kitchen would be better than the stuff available at CVS, Shop Rite or Wawa. So I looked at this pink and white box of heart-shaped cookies sitting on the dining room table with a raised eyebrow.

Noting my skepticism, Scott stated that these were his very favorite cookies and that on more than one occasion he has eaten an entire box in a single sitting. Getting excited, he explained to me that Entenmann's brings them out at every holiday, sometimes frosting them in chocolate (he believes that the St. Patrick's Day shamrock shaped cookies have a bottom coat of chocolate). He then opened the box and offered me one. One bite in, I had to eat my scornful words along with the rest of the cookie, because darn if that thing wasn't terrific. Reading the ingredient list, I was surprised to discover that they are fairly high-quality cookies, with all the ingredients you'd expect in a butter cookie (flour, butter, sugar) and and not a drop of high fructose corn syrup in sight.

While these aren't cookies I would recommend indulging in on a regular basis, they are quite wonderful as an occasional treat.

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By now, with all of our Christmas cookies recipes - Gingersnaps (two ways!), Cranberry, Orange & Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies and Chocolate Peppermint Drops - your cookie plate is going to look very appealing when you put it out with a nice variety for Santa on Christmas Eve. But Christmas just isn't quite right unless you get to spend some time decorating cookies. Not only is it a great creative outlet, but you get to eat the results.

Rather than opt for the traditional gingerbread men with royal icing, especially in light of the fact that I made gingery cookies last week, I opted to make some of my favorite Vanilla Cutout Cookies. These cookies are soft, but not cake-like, and are very easy to make. They use both butter and buttermilk in dough, both of which add a richness to the cookie, and vanilla extract with a touch of almond to keep the flavor bright. As always, I recommend using a very high quality vanilla extract or something even more vanilla-y, such as vanilla bean crush or vanilla paste to boost the vanilla flavor.