This is the vanilla counterpart of the Do-Almost-Anything Chocolate Cookie Dough. Like its chocolate partner, the dough is good on its own, endlessly adaptable and exceedingly easy to work with. Singly, each one is great; together, they’re the Batman and Robin of baking for a crowd, capable of making you look like the host who does it all effortlessly.
ON-DEMAND: Listen to Faith and Dorie talk about this cookie recipe as well as several other cookie recipes from Dorie’s book on The Faith Middleton Food Schmooze.
Excerpted from Dorie’s Cookies, published by Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright © 2016 Dorie Greenspan. Photographs © 2016 Davide Luciano and Claudia Ficca.
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| 80 cookies |
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While I know you’ll find bunches of ways to use this dough — its full vanilla flavor and mix of crisp and sandy texture are chameleon-like in their capacity to welcome other flavors and shapes. If you’d like to ice the cookies, do it when the cookies have cooled completely.
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- 1 pound (454 grams) unsalted butter cut into chunks, at room temperature
- 1-1/3 cups (262 grams) sugar
- 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 2 large egg whites at room temperature
- 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
- 4 cups (544 grams) all-purpose flour
- Sanding sugar for sprinkling (option)
- Working with a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or in a large bowl with a hand mixer, beat the butter, sugar and salt together on medium speed until smooth and creamy, about 3 minutes. Reduce the mixer speed to low and blend in the egg whites, followed by the vanilla. The dough might curdle, but it will smooth out with mixing and the addition of the flour. Still working on low speed, add the flour in 3 or 4 additions, beating only until it is almost incorporated each time before adding more; scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl a couple of times as you work and then continue to mix until the flour has disappeared into the dough.
- The dough is ready to be divided, flavored (if needed) and scooped or rolled. See the recipes mentioned above for some suggestions.
- Or, if you’d like to make plain cookies, divide the dough into quarters and shape each piece into a disk. Working with one disk at a time, place the dough between pieces of parchment paper and roll it to a thickness of ¼ inch. Slide the dough, still between the paper, onto a baking sheet — you can stack the slabs — and freeze for at least 1 hour, or refrigerate for at least 3 hours.
- Getting ready to bake: Position the racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat it to 350 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.
- Working with one disk at a time, peel away the paper on both sides of the dough and return the dough to one piece of paper. Use a 2-inch-diameter cookie cutter (choose your shape, and change the size, if you’d like, knowing that the yield will change with it) to cut out as many cookies as you can and place them on the lined baking sheets about 1½ inches apart. Gather the scraps together, then combine with scraps from the other pieces of dough, re-roll and chill before cutting and baking. If you’d like to sprinkle the cutouts with sanding sugar, now’s the time.
- Bake the cookies for 19 to 21 minutes, rotating the sheets front to back and top to bottom after 10 minutes, or until they are golden around the edges and on the bottom. Cool on the baking sheets for 5 minutes before transferring them to racks to cool completely.
- Repeat with the remaining dough, using cool baking sheets.
Storing the cookies: Wrapped airtight, the rolled-out dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 2 months. Cut and bake directly from the freezer. The baked cookies can be kept in a container at room temperature for about 5 days or frozen for up to 2 months.
