The notorious penis cookies

Well, it was a fun and productive day in the kitchen and so I thought I'd share it with you. Hope you all get as big a kick out of it as me and my daughter did. :)

So the other day my daughter came home from the mall with a penis cookie cutter! (from Spencer's of course) Well! I mean! Sigh. So, ok, I got on board. A perfect opportunity for some mother daughter bonding! So I decided to whip up a batch of my mother's butter cookies. These have been a favorite in our family from way back. Of course, usually I make these as Christmas cookies but, hey, you know, you can roll out any shape, right? Right? And they're still good, no matter what!

My mom got this recipe out of the local newspaper maybe 50 years ago, more or less. They're simple and good and full of butter. Yum!

Mom's Butter Cookies

1 cup room temp butter
1 cup sugar (I usually use 1/2 cup of white and 1/2 cup of brown sugar)
1 egg
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/14 cups sifted AP flour
extra egg yolk or two for glaze and sprinkles if desired

Cream butter, gradually add sugar. Blend in egg, salt and vanilla extract, beating well. Gradually add in flour, mixing well. If making thumb print cookies, form into small balls and mash down with your thumb on un-greased cookie sheet. If making cookie cutter shapes, refrigerate for at least 2 hours. Take quarter of the dough out at a time (put the rest of the dough back in the fridge while you're working) and roll out to an even thickness 1/4 inch thick or so. You will need a fair amount of flour to keep this buttery dough from sticking. Keeping this dough chilled and well floured is the key to successful rolling out. As you cut out the shapes, place the snippets in a pile and save for the last batch.

Here's our first sheet of penis cookies!

HA ha. We snickered a lot the whole time. Too funny. Now for the decorations. I like to put a glaze on prior to baking for some shininess and to help various sprinkles adhere. Usually I use an egg yolk mixed with a little water or milk. Left as is, it makes a nice yellow color (duh) which is great for Christmas stars. Add a drop or two of food color and you can go red or green or whatever. Fiona wanted some chocolate glaze so I added a teaspoon of cocoa and two of powdered sugar and mixed really well to one of my yolks. Then we got out our collection of sprinkles...

And Fiona went to town with various combinations of all of the above!

After some thoughtful decorating we ended up with this lovely first batch. They are now ready to go into the 350 degree oven for 10-12 minutes; there should be light golden brown edges (and bottoms) to the cookies. No brown on the top, please, that makes them a little too crispy.

And here they are out of the oven! Let them cool on the pan for a couple of minutes, then remove them with a spatula and let cool on a rack.


I hope you enjoy this recipe--let me know if you make it! No matter what the shape.