Mushroom-shaped butter cookies

After posting my latest Romanian cookie recipe, walnut-shaped cookies, I remembered that I’ve seen a really interesting recipe on Romanian bloggers’ Savori Urbane blog. Romanians really have a thing for baking all sorts of cookies – we call them “fursecuri” and they’re a must for any special occasion.

We’ve learned to make delicious sweets from simple ingredients, and that’s just how these mushroom-shaped butter cookies were created. They’re made with the most basic ingredients, but if you use good-quality ones, you’ll see that the result is spectacular.

You don’t even need any special tools to create the mushroom shape. How does that work? Well, you’ll just need an empty plastic bottle. Remove the bottle cap and dip the bottle’s “neck” into cocoa, then use it as a stamp to create the mushroom’s stem by easily poking cookie dough balls, as you can see in the picture below.

It’s that easy, really! It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to decorate over 30 cookies. I used orange zest and vanilla paste to give them some extra flavor. They’re excellent with coffee. ?

Here’s how to make them:

Ingredients

250 butter at room temperature

200 g powdered sugar

2 egg yolks

100 g sour cream

½ teaspoon vanilla paste or vanilla essence

Zest from ½ orange

A bit of salt

450 g flour

1 tablespoon cocoa

An empty plastic bottle (2l Cola bottle, for example)

Directions

1. Using a mixer, beat the butter with the powdered sugar until they’re creamy.
2. Add the egg yolks, mix, then the vanilla paste, the salt and the orange zest.
3. Add the sour cream and mix until it’s incorporated.
4. Sift the flour and add it gradually to the mixture until you get a soft, creamy dough.
5. Let the dough rest in the fridge for 30 minutes. It will harden a bit and it will be easier to form the mushroom-shaped cookies.
6. Remove the dough from the fridge. Take pieces of the dough and form round dough balls using the palms of your hands. They should be similar in size. It’s great if you have a kitchen scale to weigh them. Mine had about 30 g each.
7. Put the cocoa in a small bowl and dip the neck of the bottle in cocoa. Swirl it in cocoa to cover the neck, then slowly insert the neck in the middle of a dough ball, making sure you don’t go all the way through and pierce it. Do the same with all the remaining dough balls.
8. Heat the oven to 180 degrees and bake the cookies for 20-25 minutes, until they’re just a bit golden, not brown.
9. Remove the cookies from the oven and leave them to cool on the tray.
10. You can store the cookies in an airtight container for up to 7 days.

Enjoy!!!