Creaming Butter for Snowflake Sugar Cookies

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you how to make these beautiful snowflake cookies. Now it's time to cream together our shortening and our butter. I have already measured out 1/3 of a cup of shortening. Now use stick shortening which is the same consistency as the shortening in a can. If you can get it on sale, you can get it for even cheaper and it makes measuring so much easier. You don't have to worry about cramming it into a measuring cup and then trying to scrape it out again because the shortening is something else you want packed into a measuring cup unlike the flour. You want it packed in there and then we also have six tablespoons of butter. Now because we added salt when we were mixing up our dry ingredients we don't want to use salted butter, we want to use unsalted butter. And that's generally a good rule to follow when you are baking because that way you have control over how much salt is being added. You want a little bit of salt but you also want to know how much it is. Now if you were good and you thought far enough in advance the butter will be about room temperature. That is going to make it much easier for creaming. We are going to stick that on. Make sure the bowl is locked. Make sure that the top is locked and then you are going to start at a slower speed and then work your way up. So you really want everything mixed in well together. A nice consistent type of mixture. Now that our butter and shortening have been creamed it is time to add the sugar. This is almost always the next step after creaming the butter or shortening your fats for a baking project. So we are going to add 3/4 of a cup of granulated sugar and of course granulated sugar just kind of pours in there. You don't have to worry about it being packed or not packed because it is just going to flow nicely. It's really great if you can get odd size measuring cups. The 2/3 of a cup, 3/4 of a cup, it makes things much easier when you are doing lots of measuring of very certain things. So we have got that sugar in there and we are just going to mix it in. It will only take a couple of moments. Also a benefit of having a nice powerful mixer makes everything take much less time. So we just want to scrape that down because you are going to end up with a little bit of sugar at the bottom as you can see. It doesn't get mixed in so you want to scrape it down. Cause you want to make sure everything is mixed in before you add your next ingredients. Put that back down and mix for another moment. "