How to Make Spritz Cookies My Favorite Holiday Cookies!

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making spritz cookies, so let's get started. To make these cookies, you need butter, sugar, some flavorings, an egg, salt, and flour. Do you need a cookie press to make these? No, I'm gonna show you how to do it both ways. First off, set that oven to 350. There's no chill time for these cookies, and grab a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, or just your hand mixer, both will work. These cookies are very happy when you have room temperature soft butter, so we want one cup, or 226 grams, of unsalted soft butter, there we go. Just give this a little bit of a mix to see how soft it is. That's nice and creamy. Now I'm grabbing 150 grams, or three quarters of a cup, of granulated sugar, along with half a teaspoon of salt, there we go. Mix this up until it is like, you know, really combined, getting to light and fluffy. And scrape that bowl down. Spritz cookies are one of my favorite holiday cookies. They're just like, really cute, they're so fun to make and eat, and they're great to have out for parties, or to give as little cookie gifts. I hope you're giving cookie gifts out during the holidays, it's the best part of the holidays. Now, I'm gonna add one egg, no shuds. I also want one teaspoon of vanilla, and one teaspoon of almond extract. Almond extract is so, like, one of my favorites. It's amazing, and it really adds a lot of flavor to these cookies. These cookies are all about the texture when you're making the dough. So, if you take a look here, you can see pure butter and sugar, lots of egg over here. You can see it's broken, so it hasn't come together, it's little granules of butter and egg. Let's just scrape it down. And we're gonna mix this until it really has come together, and you'll notice the difference in texture. All right, let's take a look. Yeah, this is what I wanna see. Now, it's totally uniform, there's no streaks, and it's not broken anymore, it's just come together nicely. At this point, you have a choice. You can add the flour in and keep going, or you could add a little food coloring in, and I have a couple batches made already. It's really important to add the food coloring in before the flour. This one is gonna be green, because I want green Christmas trees, hello. One drop of food color is what you're gonna start off with. This is gonna lighten up when we add the flour, so it could be a bit darker. Two drops of food coloring is what we're gonna add. So, the food coloring is optional. If you wanna get the color without food coloring, you can try things like matcha powder for a green, freeze-dried raspberries or raspberry juice for pink, stuff like that. Now we're gonna add two and a third cups of all-purpose flour. If you want this to mix really easily, just scrape the bowl down first. Before you start mixing, it'll have a head start. You let me know in the comments what your favorite shape of spritz cookie is. By the way, I'm very excited to show you all the different ways that you could make spritz cookies without the gun, because I know not all of us have it, or maybe you can't find it. This is just like Play-Doh, basically. It's actually softer than Play-Doh a bit. I'm loading up my spritz cookie extruder. If you're wondering why they're called spritz cookies, it comes from the German word spritzen, which means to squirt, because you're kind of squirting them out of the press. I want you to see I have a couple different sets of these, and some of them are metal, some of them are plastic. They both work out just fine. Today I'm gonna use the Christmas tree and a hreif. This batter couldn't be simpler. The tricky part is actually pressing them out and getting those beautiful shapes. Stay tuned for that. There's a couple of really easy things you can do so it's foolproof every time. Grab a sheet tray, and unlike almost every other cookie, no parchment paper. Not today. We're gonna press directly onto the pan, because these cookies have to stick. You're gonna press the press right down so it makes contact, and give it a pump. That worked. When you look at your press, it should be pretty clean. If there's a lot of residual dough, it's not gonna give you a nice shape. For my uncolored dough, I have some snowflakes. Let's see how those pipe out. If you don't have a spritz press, it's okay. Just use some piping tips that you have hanging around in a piping bag, and pipe out nice shapes. The things that work really well are gonna be star tips, and this one is like a flower tip. It's a 109. Look at this. This is amazing. Makes little cookies, cookie flowers. If you wanna add some extra decoration, we're just gonna use some sprinkles, and just spoon them on top. You might get a little bit of bleeding, and some of the bigger sprinkles might collapse, but these tiny non-pareils work very well. And once you're happy with this easy decoration, these cookies can go right into the oven. So good. I've eaten half of them already. They're buttery, full of flavor, and just a delight. Hope you get a chance to make this recipe, and I'll see you in the next cookie video. If you like this recipe, check out my holiday playlist.