This is the easiest, tastiest butter cookie recipe I have come across. It is simple to make, fail-proof and super delicious. So good I have to write this down for future reference.

Ingredients

Makes 40 -45 cookies or 2 trays.

125g butter (softened ie indented when pressed but not melty)
180g cake flour (sifting not required)
30g castor sugar
30g powdered sugar
90ml heavy whipped cream
2g salt
1tsp vanilla extract

Method

1. Place all the dry ingredients ie flour, sugar, salt in a mixing bowl. Mix thoroughly, about 30s – 1 min with a mixer.
2. Add butter to (1). The mixture will turn sandy & crumbly first then become paste-like when all the butter and dry ingredients have been thoroughly combined. About 3-4 min.
3. Add the vanilla and whipped cream (in 3 portions) to (2). Mix until well incorporated. You should get a pale, smooth, viscous dough.
4. Chill dough briefly (2-3 min) in the fridge while you set up oven to pre-heat (180°C) and line the trays with baking paper.
5. Scrap all the batter into a large pipping bag. Pipe cookies with a 1M Star tip (9.1mm). Chill the cookies in fridge if oven is not finished pre-heating. Cookies that will not be baked immediately goes into the fridge.
6. Bake at 180°C for 20 minutes. Remove and let cool on cooling rack.

Notes

This recipe uses the reverse-creaming method. Butter is creamed with dry ingredients first, before adding in the wet ingredients.

Some say cookies made with reverse-creaming will be flat, that they will not spread during the bake. I have found no discernible difference in the texture or behaviour between this method vs the usual butter-first creaming method.

With reverse-creaming I don’t have to eye-ball the mixture to make sure I don’t over-cream. This and not needing to sift the flour are small bonuses.

Pipping the dough is the easiest and fastest way to shape the cookies. The dough texture is soft so any other forms of shaping ie rolling into a log, beating it into a square etc requires extremely cold, extremely dexterous hands.

Always chill the pipped cookies first especially if the kitchen is warm (like mine).

For variation, add some finely grounded chocolate flakes/rice to the final batter before pipping.