Nichole Ferrigno: Hi, I am Nichole Ferrigno. I am here today with Lizzy Evelyn. We are with Paisley Fig Pastries. We are going to show you today how to make holiday cookies. Next, we are going to show you how to make our dough for the Chocolate Peppermint Sandwich Cookies. So, for this recipe, we are going to start with two sticks of unsalted softened butter. We are going to add to that three quarters of a cup of granulated sugar and will add the sugar to the butter while the stand mixer is mixing on medium speed.

So we can go ahead and turn that on. Once the sugar is added to the butter, you will want to mix it for a couple of minutes until the mixture is fluffy and pale yellow. After the mixture has been mixing for just a minute, you will want to scrape the bowl down with a rubber spatula, just that all the ingredients are incorporated fully into the mixture, turn the mixture back on. After the butter and the sugar has been creaming for several minutes, we are going to add one large egg yolk and one teaspoon of vanilla extract and then again, we will continue mixing on medium speed.

We are going to stop once more and scrape the bowl down. Again, very important to make sure that all the ingredients are fully incorporated. It is important that you allow the egg yolk to mix in for, I do not know 30 seconds or so and then at that point we will stop the mixer and we will add our dry ingredients which include two cups of all purpose flour, a half cup of unsweetened Dutch process coco powder, a half teaspoon of baking powder and a half teaspoon of salt. We are going to add that dry mixture in two parts and you are going to want to mix on low speed, so that the ingredients do not go flying out the bowl. An important thing to keep in mind whenever you are adding a flour to a cookie dough like this, you only want to mix just until the flour disappears, you do not want to over work the dough. So again we are scraping the bowl down, we are going to add the second part of our dry ingredients, mixing on low once again and only until the flour disappears.

So, at this point, once the dough is mostly coming together and it is a bit of a dry dough but we are going to finish it up by hand or spatula. So we are going to go, we are going to go ahead and finish up our dough here. We are going to do so off the mixer and with a spatula, you may need to actually get in there with your hands to finish up the dough. Make sure your hands are clean of course, but that will actually allow the dough to come together into a nice meatball without over working it in the mixer.

So Lizzy is going to go ahead and do it by hand and as soon as we are finished up with this dough, we are going to go ahead and press it into plastic wraps, pack it down as thin as possible and then chill it in a refrigerator just until it is firm or maybe an hour or two. So, we are going to go ahead and press this dough into plastic wraps and at this point this it is a nice meatball, it is all gathered together nicely and as you can see what Lizzy is doing is that she is actually pressing on the dough to make it into sort of flat disc that will the chill the dough a bit faster. Great and now we are going to go ahead and throw it the fridge.

So now that we have wrapped our dough up in plastic, we have set it in the fridge to chill for about an hour or two until it is firm enough to roll and next we will go ahead and show you how to roll it out, stamp out, shape and then bake.