Chocolate Spritz Cookies

How does one misplace an ingredient? Well, these chocolate cookies were supposed to be green — as in flavoured with green tea powder. But, for the life of me, I couldn't find the tin of matcha green tea powder I had purchased in Japan some time ago. I literally cleaned out my kitchen shelves looking for the darn thing. Where'd it go? If I didn't know better, I'd think my kitchen pantry was haunted. Oh well.

Since I'd taken out my butter to cool and measured all the other ingredients for these cookies, I decided to replace the green tea powder with cocoa powder instead — at least I knew where the cocoa was.

Scatterbrain, you say? Well, you're absolutely right. Still, the cocoa was a good substitute and these spritz cookies — made with my mum's old cookie press — turned out well.

The recipe is courtesy of Martha Stewart — she has a basic dough recipe for spritz cookies and also variations depending on the flavour you hope to achieve: citrus, chocolate, spiced or just plain vanilla. She also suggests various glazes for the cookies which I chose to forgo the glaze time around — the stress of hunting down the green tea powder left me a little winded. Yes, of course I am exaggerating. 

A spritz cookie is ultimately a butter cookie that's made using a cookie press. The term 'spritz' comes from the German word 'spritzen' which is to squirt. well, the cookie press doesn't exactly squirt out cookies but you get the idea, right?

A cookie press (see pic above) is a cylindrical device made of stainless steel (the more modern ones come in plastic). It comprises a barrel to hold the dough, a stainless steel lever/trigger that 'squirts' out the dough and a set of shape-discs that determine what shape your cookies take: the shapes include pretty wreaths, flowers, trees, rosettes, stars, and stripes, hears and many more. Pretty neat!

For the dough to go through the discs, the consistency has to be a little softer than the dough you use for cut-out cookies. And, it has to be chilled first.

I had a blast playing with the different shapes and decided to garnish them with desiccated coconut because I love coconut.

FYI: If you don't have a spritzer, just add 1 tsp baking powder and scant 1/3 cup four to the the same recipe and you can make cut-out cookies with them. 

Chocolate Spritz Cookies

22/3 cups all purpose flour

1/3 cup cocoa

1/2 tsp salt

228g unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla extract

Whisk the flour, cocoa and salt in a large bowl.

Beat the butter and sugar in a mixer (medium-high speed) until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and mix until well incorporated. Reduce speed to low and add the flour gradually and beat till combined.

Refrigerate dough for at least 20 minutes before filling the spritzer with dough. Spritz the cookies straight onto a lined baking sheet, about an inch apart, and bake for 12-14 mins. Let cool completely before storing (or eating) them!