How to Make Danish Butter Cookies

Bold Bakers, you've asked for a video for this recipe and it is finally here. Danish butter cookies, this iconic tin Danish butter cookies, this iconic tin that we all get every Christmas and give to people as gifts. I'm going to show you how to make these beautiful buttery cookies at home really simply. And I'm going to share with you my top piping tips to make yours look just like this and make your life really easy this holiday season. I'm delighted to say that this is the simplest holiday cookie you're ever going to come across. You can do this by hand with an electric hand mixer, or you can do it on stand mixer. I'm going to do mine on my stand mixer because it's right here. So one of the tips here is that you want to have really soft butter when making this cookie. Making a lot of cookies around the holiday, make sure that your butter is really room temperature. Like I leave mine out overnight to get it really soft like this. And it just makes all the difference and it's going to cream up your ingredients so much better. So it's going to make sure the very first step of your cookies, which is this, creaming butter and sugar together, is done right. Look at that, look how soft it is. Then we're going to add in our granulated sugar and let those cream together on like a medium high speed for a few minutes until they're light and pale and fluffy. So at this time of year on BiggerBolderBaking.com, cookies are the top searched recipes. But this one in particular, Danish Butter Cookie, is like top of the top. Everybody raves about this cookie. And every time we post it on social, people go nuts for it, and they've always been asking for the video and now you have it. Into the butter and sugar I'm going to add in a little bit of salt. When it's nice and light and fluffy just like this. It's the perfect foundation to whip the rest of our cookie on top of. So in goes our one egg. Get that cream in really well. Often high speed we'll get rid of that. Okey dokey, in with our vanilla extract. If you want to get really fancy with this cookie, you could also put in vanilla bean paste and that would just, it would number one look lovely but also it would taste lovely. And you get a little pop of the vanilla bean. Those ingredients are creamed up nicely together. I'm going to turn it down a little bit now. And I'm going to add in our all purpose flour. This is just regular plain flour on a low speed. We're not trying to beat it here. We want to have lovely soft, buttery, crumbly cookies, not tough cookies. Making sure that you've started out with soft butter and having a soft dough will make sure that it's really easy to pipe later. Now let's see. Beautiful, look at that. Nice soft cookie. This is exactly what I want. We're not rolling it. We are piping this bad boy and this is a great consistency. Okay there you go, I told you it was simple so let me grab my trays, my piping bag and I'll share with you my tips. Okay folks, five piping tips that are going to rock your world. Not really, but they're really good piping tips so listen up. Number one, soft dough. Now we talked about this already. Make sure for something like when you're piping a cookie your dough is lovely and soft. So soft butter, whip it up really well, make sure it's really well combined just like my one is there. That's tip number one. Tip number two, this is an important one buy Good Quality Piping Bags. I'll tell you why. You know it's a soft dough, yes, but it still can be tough to pipe so you need a good quality piping bag like this one. If you don't have a good quality one it can burst and you can't use a Ziploc bag so good quality one. I use Ateco and these are really good and they're inexpensive too. You also want a large piping bag. Make sure it's really big. You don't want to be stuffing it in the cookie to come out of the top. Just like a big piping bag you also want a big nozzle. If your nozzle is too small then your cookie won't pipe as well so you want a nice big nozzle. Or we're going to fill the piping bag. Now I'm going to show you how to correctly fill a piping bag so you don't end up with air bubbles. Here's what you want to do. Put your hand up there like that. You have the piping nozzle close by here. You can also do this in a glass. Some people like to do it that way. They kind of have more control. Just like that. And we are going to take our soft dough and you are going to shove that down towards the nozzle. Pack it in there as best you can. You don't want any room for air bubbles because if you get an air bubble in your cookie there will be a gap in your dough and your piping and it won't be beautiful and smooth. So we want to make sure that we don't have any air bubbles as we put our dough into the piping bag. And it can happen you know. That's my fifth tip to show you how to pipe them. It's really easy. The first thing we're going to do is hold the piping bag in one hand, your strong hand, and then we're just going to guide us with the other hand. What I do not want to see is I don't want to see people doing this. I see this online and it drives me bananas. That is not the correct way. So I want to make sure that you know how to do it correctly. Doing it the way I'm telling you will make your life so much easier. So put down, straight down. You're around half an inch away from the tray. Go in a circle. Pull it off at the end. Just keep on going until all your dough is gone. You will notice as you go along you'll get better at it. And as you can see, no air bubbles in my piping bag so there's no gaps in the dough. It's going to make around 35 to 40 cookies. The last thing we're going to do which is the iconic look of these cookies is to sprinkle over a little bit of just granulated sugar. Okay that was our finishing touch. Now my oven has preheated so let's get them in there. So we're going to bake these cookies fan-assist on because we've got two trays going into the oven and I want that air to circulate around for even baking. 325 degrees Fahrenheit, 165 degrees Celsius for around 15 minutes. You want to get them a light golden brown but not too brown. Whoa these cookies are the real deal. Look how fantastic they look. They held their shape. They're the perfect size and they smell just like the original cookie. They are so buttery, sweet. They look amazing. Once your cookies have cooled down they are ready to be enjoyed. Give some to your friends and family in a lovely tin just like this one. They will look and feel and taste just like the original. Actually better because they're homemade. Things can get a little hectic around the holidays and if you want to keep things simple then this is the recipe for you. They look great, they smell great, people are going to love them. And of course because I'm Irish they are perfect with a cup of tea. If you're going to gift just one cookie this holiday season then this is your guy. You are going to be so impressed. Thank you so much for watching. If you're in the mood for some more holiday baking then stay put. I've got hours of holiday content for you to check out. I'll see you back here again really soon.