Root Beer Cookies
Ingredients
12 ounces Flour
½ tsp Baking soda
¼ tsp Salt
¾ cup Butter, room temperature
1 cup Brown sugar
1 large Egg
¼ cup Root beer extract (Cook's)
Instructions
Whisk flour, soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Cream together butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and extract until mixed, scraping bowl as needed. Add flour mixture to butter mixture and mix until combined.
Divide dough into 3 or 4 pieces on separate pieces of plastic wrap. Wrap and press into a disk, and chill overnight or at least 1 hour.
Preheat oven to 375 ℉ and line baking sheets with parchment. Roll a disk of dough on a floured surface to ¼ inch thick. Cut with cookie cutters and place on baking sheet at least ½ apart. Scraps can be re-rolled, but it's better to press the scraps back together and chill them in the freezer while you roll and cut the next disk.
Bake about 9 minutes, rotating half way through. Shift to cooling racks after a couple minutes so they don't keep cooking on the hot baking sheet. Let cool and rest completely before serving. Resting them lets the remaining moisture equalize for a better consistency.
Story
My friend Daryl (SodaFry) Allen, made root beer gingerbread cookies several years ago. I like the idea (I love root beer), but I wanted a simpler recipe, only root beer flavor, and of course you want to measure flour by weight.
I based it on Gingerbread Cookies by Natasha Kravchuk but I used ½ cup each of white and brown sugar out of habit (many cooky recipes start this way) so I had to omit the molasses. That turned out to be a good thing anyway with the focus on pure root beer flavor. And I added a lot more root beer extract to make up for everything that was missing. One batch turned out great for me, at 9 minutes and cooled on a cooling rack.
My first batch was hit by a power outage, so I left them in a while to cure. They turned out thinner and crunchy, alas, but not bad. The last batch was left in closer to 10 minutes and then cooled on the pan. These turned out less soft than I wanted. Ovens vary a lot, but you can't go by color when the color is dark brown to begin with.
A warning about flavoring: As far as I can tell there's no standard for how intensely flavored a root beer extract should be. So a ¼ cup of something other than Cook's might turn out very different than you hope. It's also a lot of extract, about half of a 4 oz bottle, which might not be an appealing proposition for you as extract can be expensive. You might also prefer less flavor. To each their own.
The orca cookies pictured above were cut with Cookie Cutter - Orca by MettGyver.