Nichole Ferrigno: Hi, I am Nichole Ferrigno. I am here today with Lizzy Evelyn. We are with Paisley Fig Pastries and today we are showing you how to make holiday cookies. While your chocolate cookie dough is chilling in the fridge, it is a good idea to go ahead and make use of your time. So, what we are going to do is make the filling that we will need for our chocolate peppermint sandwich cookies. So, as you might guess, based on the name, it is a peppermint filling and it is not a basic butter cream type filling. We are going to start with four ounces or one stick of softened unsalted butter and you really want to cream it. So, you really want to cream it.

So, we are creaming our four ounces of stuffing butter and to that we are going to add about half a cup to three quarters of a cup of ten-X or confectioner sugar. Now, if you are making a larger batch of cookies then you would like a larger batch of fillings, you can certainly do so by doubling or tripling the recipe. It is a fairly basic ratio, one to one ratio of butter and confectioner sugar. So, you could do a one pounds recipe of butter to one pound of confectioner sugar. We are going to continue adding the confectioner sugar and you are going to beat it on medium speed to get it nice and fluffy.

It is a great, simple, straightforward filling. These are final ingredients, it is going to be the peppermint extracts and you want to surely good quality peppermint extract to add a lot of strength to it because you don t really want to dilute the filling with a lot of liquids. So, the stronger your extract is the less you have to add and we are going to add about half a teaspoon.

We are scrapping the bowl down and that looks great, nice and silky and smooth. You don t want the mixture to look curdled or separated at all, it should be very silky. We are going to go ahead and take it out of the mixing ball using our rubber spatula and what we are actually going to do is load it directly into our pastry bag. This is a washable reusable pastry bag, synthetic; you can get it in most baking supply shops. It comes in really handy for cake decorating, lot of other decorating techniques. I have fitted the bag with a small French star tip and what we are going to do is full the top of the bag over like this, rest the collar in my hand and then open it up and Lizzy is going to fill it up with our fillings.

We have load it straight in, very nice and now we can put this to the side until we are ready to use later on to fill our cookies. So, that s how you make the peppermint fillings for the chocolate peppermint sandwich cookies. When we come back we are going to show how to actually fill and finish the cookies.