Williams Butter Cookies

To make these butter cookies, before we start mixing, you’re going to want to make sure you have a cookie press, and if you don’t… good luck? You can shape the dough by hand, but each batch makes 3 dozen cookies, so reader beware.

For a single batch (the furthest left measurements), one that makes 3 dozen cookies, here’s what you do:

1. Creme 1/2 cup of butter.
2. Gradually add 1/2 cups of granulated white sugar.
3. Add one egg and 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. Beat mixture well.
4. Add 1 2/3 cups of all-purpose flour and 1/2 teaspoons of salt. Mix thoroughly until texture is consistent all the way through.
5. If dough seems overly soft, wrap in plastic and place in refrigerator for 5-10 minutes.
6. Place dough in cookie press and create cookies of any desired shape on a baking sheet.
7. OPTIONAL: Decorate the uncooked cookies with sprinkles for an extra festive splash of color.
8. Bake cookies at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-10 minutes (or until golden brown.)

Allow me to set the scene. It’s Christmas, well, early December, in Southwest Missouri, and the year is irrelevant. It’s a whopping 30 degrees outside, but that’s okay, because you’ve been inside baking all day, and the kitchen, at least, gets warm. You’ve been alternating between watching your father use swear words you’ve never heard while he tries to put lights on the tree in the corner of the living room and “helping” your mother decorate cookies by adding sprinkles and eating the ones that come out of the oven deformed or overly done. There’s colorful sugar sprinkles on the dining room floor, but you don’t notice them until you step on them, barefoot, and they stab you in the toes. Your mother keeps telling you to put on socks, but you insist that socks are for squares, and really, your feet aren’t cold, it’s fine, chill out. You’ll freeze most of this triple batch of Butter Cookies, because if you don’t, your dad will eat all of them before the 25th without even thinking about it. Your mom presses a finger to her lips as she snatches a single broken flower-shaped cookie and pops it into her mouth. You do the same, and she smiles with her eyes as the oven shrieks at you to take out this particular round of trees.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve had butter cookies at Christmas. For me, they go hand in hand with other holiday classics from my house (many of which don’t really have proper names so much as descriptors) like Those Little Chocolate Cookies, Peanut Butter Sandwiches (which are not exactly what they sound like, I promise), Almond Bark Pretzels, and sometimes, Sugar Cookies. They’re a staple of the holidays, just like the movie A Christmas Story and my father kvetching about how the rest of us are decorating the tree. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas without them.

As far as I and my mother know, this comes from her mother’s side of the family, which means this may very well be from the old country. Googling butter cookie recipes doesn’t bring up anything quite like this particular recipe, so I’m inclined to believe it actually did come from my grandmother’s family, and not some long-defunct cookbook.

If I were being strictly truthful with how this recipe actually goes, I would have included a few more extraneous steps, like “Forget to preheat the oven and curse, briefly, under your breath” and “Put the shaper disc in the cookie press the wrong way around, remove and flip, realize it was the right way around the first time, and change it back” and “Insistently attempt to decorate the camel cookies, despite knowledge that sprinkles can and will simply roll off of them and onto the floor, like they have every year previous.” But these aren’t actually helpful, just a sort of short catalogue of how we manage to mess up, once a year, year after year.

My mother initially did not want me to take a picture of her recipe card for this because she thinks having the measurements for a double and triple batch off to the side makes a recipe card “messy” and “hard to read.” I told her that the extra scribbles add to the charm, which may or may not be true, but I mostly didn’t want to have to attach a screenshot of a text onto this.