Cookie!

Day 52: The world is a pretty grim place right now, so I decided to get a tiny little head start on the holidays by making spritz. Normally, I wouldn't start my holiday baking until St. Nicholas' Day when spritz or sandies would kick off the season. However, I'd run myself out of cookies, and since I am the original Cookie Monster, I had a good excuse. There was just one hitch: margarine. The recipe calls for three sticks, leaving it up to the cook to decide whether they want to use butter, margarine. or a combination of the two. For decades...decades!...I've made spritz using one cube of margarine and two of butter. I seldom use margarine anywhere else, except in my chocolate chip cookies. And now, stick margarine has all but disappeared from grocery store shelves, with the exception of that branded Imperial.

I don't know what they put in Imperial, but a few months ago when I made my first batch of chocolate chip cookies using it, they flattened out to wafers with little chocolate mountains poking up. Not only were they flat, they didn't taste like they should have done. I tried to find another brand of stick margarine, and that's when I realized there was a problem. Apparently, no one is making it now. Several experiments later, I found that by adding almost a full cup extra of flour, they were at least edible. So why did I dive right into spritz without thinking about that?

I thought the dough looked and felt off in the mixer bowl, but when I tried to put it through the cookie press, it became obvious that it was just too gooey. I put it back on the mixer and added flour...roughly an additional 3/4 cup to the 4 cups specified in the recipe...until it reached the right consistency. Perhaps I could have added another 1/4 cup of sugar as well (I'll do that next time). Imperial margarine is a royal disaster.