Betty Crocker - How to Make Perfect Molded Cookies

For my last post I decided to make Russian tea cakes. The tips on page 23 said to make the dough as the recipe directed, chill if needed, roll into balls between the palms of hands, bake as balls or flatten with bottom of glass or fork and to take your time and mold the cookies carefully.

I started off making the dough which was a fairly simple dough, similar to my last post except with less flour. I then rolled out the cookies in 1 inch balls. This was probably the longest process of making these cookies. Once they were all on the pan I baked them in the oven at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes.

The second longest process was rolling all 27 cookies in powdered sugar while they were still warm. I tried many different techniques when rolling them in the sugar many of which failed. I might have done something wrong but the cookies in the picture seemed to have a nice even coat of powdered sugar and mine had a sticky film around them instead. I gave up on trying different techniques and just rolled them in my hand in the powdered sugar.

I would not recommend this recipe unless you have a lot of time and patience, this is by far the messiest recipe I have tried. Powdered sugar gets everywhere and is very difficult to clean up and the cookies didn't really taste that good for the amount of effort I put into them.

Ingredients 

mixing butter sugar and vanilla

mixing flour and salt

fully mixed

after baking

The mess 

Finished product

Would you guys be willing to make these even though they are really messy?
If you would change anything what would you change or do different?

Betty Crocker - How to make the perfect rolled cookies

I made scotch shortbread for my fourth post. The directions told me to make the dough as directed and roll out part of the dough and chill the rest. I found that with the dough I made, the warmth didn't matter as much as other dough would have because of how crumbly it was.

It then said to lightly roll dough to desired thickness. I tries to do it as lightly as possible but every time I rolled out the dough it cracked everywhere, I compared it to a desert. I ended up squishing it together then squishing int down with my hands and a spatula.

I was supposed to dip the cookie cutter in flour so the dough didn't stick, which I did with the first 2 cookies, but then I realized it didn't make a difference whether I floured it or not. I ended up straying farther from the directions than I have in any of my posts. I did give up making the cookies after having to roll out the dough so many times so there was a bit of leftover dough.

If I do make this again, which I probably won't, I would maybe add a little bit of milk to make it not a crumbly mess. It was very frustrating making these cookies but I learned to exercise my patience and that cookies that take a lot of work sometimes don't taste amazing. The cookies were very bland and dry, probably needed to be dipped in something for them to taste better, like coffee or tea.

Ingredients

Mixing ingredients

Final dough

Cut out dough

baked

Final product