Cookie Dough Help Needed

for the 2nd week in the row, i'm sending the girls off with icky cookies to share-a-treat day at school. oh, they'll taste great, but they look blech!

i've done a lot of cookie baking, but going through my recipes, i realized that all of them were of the sort where exact shape didn't matter. that's not the case now. little kids want their zoo animal sugar cookies to actually look like zoo animals, not melted blobs of tasty sparkly colored dough. the chocolate chip pretend doggie bones should be vaguely bone shaped instead of slumpy rectangles.

i used a standard sugar cookie recipe last week and some miniature animal cutters about 2". this week i used the standard toll house choc chip recipe, and it was a disaster. it was so sticky there was no way i could even think about cookie cutter-ing it. i added another cup of flour and was able to squish it flat like play-doh to the thickness of one chip and cut it. even with the extra flour, it still tasted good. but they sure don't look like doggy bones.

i'm off cookies next week. it's under-the-sea week & i'm making oysters from 2 madelines made of yellow cake for shells with pastry cream oysters and grey fondant pearls inside. but then it's dinosaurs. and i need t-rex to look like t-rex and not t-wrecks. :)

what's the trick to making cookies with cookie cutters that hold their shape once baked? is there some sort of perfect dough recipe for using cutters? can anyone offer some cookie advice?

thanks,
--gothgate

it sounds like cookie-wise i've been doing everything wrong! :crazy:

i do tend to over-cream my butter & sugar. i figured a creamy mixture makes for a softer cookie, not figuring that a softer cookie spreads more. duh. i'll try to keep it grainier.

i did refrigerate the sugar cookie dough just a little (i'm impatient!). unfortunately though, by the time i thought about doing that with the choc chips, my kitchen thermometer was reading 96* and not only the cookies but the cook was melting. i'll try that next time.

i use unsalted butter in cookies. i like the taste better than regular shortening or margerine. even the butter-flavored kind -- although that's probably a mental thing, if i didn't know how it was made i probably couldn't tell. it's just that shortening looks & feels so... eeeww. so i'll probably make that change as an absolute last resort.

someone on another board suggested baking the cookies like a very thin cake and then punching out the cookies after they're cooked. i might try that, but i'm afraid that might wind up with the kind of iced cookies you get at winn-dixie or wal-mart that taste like, well, cake.

i was reading my betty crocker cookbook last night and they suggested adding flour for a stiffer dough (which i figured out on my own). but there were so few cookie recipes in there! i was very disappointed with that cookbook on many levels. i'm tired of everything being low-fat & low-carb & low-sugar & low taste. i'm still hanging on to my tattered old cookbooks from the 60s & 70s when things tasted right. no, you can't eat rich stuff like that every day, but when i want cookies, i want them to taste like cookies darn it! not low-fat low-carb cardboard.

@panini: i'd love a copy of your recipe. i've been wanting a very basic cookie recipe that i can use alone and also experiment with.

next week in addition to working on my madeleine recipe, i'll be testing out cookie methods. the kids are gonna love coming home to that every day! :bounce:
hopefully dinosaurs will rule the school rather than go extinct in the oven.

@Panini: Thanks so much! it sounds like a great recipe. i'll use it during next week's cookie testings. just a couple of questions... what is high protein flour & what is bench flour? all i have in my pantry is all-purpose & cake flour. is this other stuff usually available at a regular grocery?

so i found out about the choc chippers. :) i figured it might work because i'd seen those giant shaped choc chip cookies in stores. i wasn't really set on choc chip cookies though. i was looking for something that would be doggie treat texture. at first i thought oatmeal raisin, but i know those are even gooier.

yeah, the teachers think i'm some kind of pastry god. :chef: i'm just a dabbler. nothing comes out quite right to my eye, but it all tastes good. i'm much better at cakes & cupcakes. my best cake ever was making a 3D Starship Enterprise (classic Trek) birthday cake for a friend. a few weeks ago for beach week i made a sandcastle with a special pan i got from betty crocker. and i used molded candies for seashells, starfish, etc.

sometimes i feel bad about making all this stuff. i'm not trying to compete or outdo the other parents and i certainly don't want anyone to feel bad. i just love doing this stuff. i stopped baking for years because for just me, and then later for just me & my wife, i didn't see the point. now that i have a family again, i'm really loving getting back into it.

funny thing is, when it's the girls' birthdays, i always get a store-bought cake. i remember that when i was growing up, as much as i loved cooking with my mom & grandmother, i always felt poor that we had homemade birthday cakes when my friends didn't. even though the homemade ones were tastier & prettier, it was a 'being different' thing. so birthdays are for store-bought cakes.