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  • Cook's Illustrated

    KITCHEN NOTES

    Oct 09, 2018 6 minutes
    BY STEVE DUNN, ANDREA GEARY, ANDREW JANJIGIAN & LANLAM

    WHAT IS IT?

    This tool is a vintage cookie press from Denmark, where pressed (and piped) butter cookies have long been a holiday tradition. Manufactured in the early 1900s from rolled steel and wood, this simple manual press calls for filling the hollow tube with cookie dough, screwing a shaping disk onto the end, and then pressing the wooden plunger through the tube to extrude dough onto a baking sheet. How well does it work? To be fair, perfectly pressed cookies can be tricky to make even with the latest gun-style presses. If the dough is too cold, it can jam up the press; too warm or loose and the dough won’t hold its shape when extruded.

    Nevertheless, using this manual-plunge press was especially challenging. Modern versions call for placing the press directly on the baking sheet for stability and then squeezing the handle to extrude a premeasured quantity of dough. This tool, however,

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