Lovin' from the oven!

To celebrate Valentine's day I broke out my trusty cookie press and made two batches of my famous butter cookies.   This is seriously the easiest cookie recipe I've ever come across.  It's so simple that people never believe me when I tell them it is only three ingredients.  Flour, butter, and a dry cake mix.  That's it!  I always make lots of these at Christmas time and try to make others throughout the year to make use of the little shape discs that never get used.   Here's the cast of characters for this sinfully simple recipe:

For each batch, I soften one pound of butter (that's right, nothing says lovin' like a pound of butter!) in the microwave for a minute and a half.  Then mix in 2 and 3/4 cups of flour and one dry cake mix.  This is where you can get all creative.  I usually use a white cake mix for the standard cookie, but the strawberry cake mix makes very yummy valentine treats.  You can use whatever flavor you prefer, or you can add food coloring to the dough that you make with the white mix.  For today's recipe, I made one batch with strawberry and one with white. 

Once all of the ingredients are incorporated, fill a cookie press and start pressing out these buttery blobs of goodness.   For those who don't know, a cookie press is much like a caulking gun, but filled with dough, and presses out shapes through little discs.  I think my Pampered Chef press came with 16 different shape discs. I much prefer this method of getting shaped cookies, since I hate to roll out dough for cut-out cookies.  And these cookies are great because you don't have to fuss with icing.  Before you put them in the oven, you can add sprinkles or jimmies.  This where my little guys like to help.  They say there can never be too many sprinkles!

Then you bake them in a 350* oven for 10-12 minutes.  Since the butter content is so high, these little guys burn very easily, so make sure to pull them out before the edges get brown.  Let them cool on the cookie sheet for 5-10 minutes so they don't break when you try to remove them.  Or if you want a good excuse to sample a few, go ahead and remove them and eat the ones that break.  It depends on what shape you're using, but one batch of this heart shape made 95 cookies.  That's a whole lot of lovin'!  We boxed up a mixture of the pink and white ones for the boys' teachers and I had plenty extras so that hubby and I can share with co-workers tomorrow!