My friend at the gym told me that Hong Kong Jenny’s Bakery Cookies are what she pines for. That set me looking for the perfect cookie to create.

The first thing I did was to buy a tin of that cookie. It costs USD20 for a box of 33 cookies. It is not cheap.

What’s the difference between the Asian and Western butter cookies? Asians like our stuff smooth, melt-in-the mouth and fine. Westerners are into big tastes, chunkier

First, I investigated how it looks: though it looks piped, it is really dense in the middle, which somehow defeats the purpose of a piped cookie in my opinion. I’d prefer my cookie to have layers of cookie rather than one whole block. So, I will change the piping.

Next, the taste. The mouth-feel is great. It melts in the mouth and has no after taste at all. Love that. Not too sweet and still packs a punch. All of the four flavours I have tried were great!

I looked at the ingredients and it says to use wheat flour, sugar, butter and salt. Super fine wheat flour is something difficult to get, so I have decided to change some of the ingredients to make it more ‘public-friendly’.

In the end, I shaped the cookies differently from Jenny’s so that the layers are more pronounced, enhancing the premium butter I used. I set the oven really low so that the cookie is crunchy on the outside crumbly on the inside.

I conducted a blind test too:

The results of the blind test with 10 people are such:

Jenny’s vanilla cookie vs The Vanilla Butter Cookie, 0 : 10. For some reason, there is a preference to my cookie. It is either because my cookie is really much better, or it is because they are freshly baked compared to something that’s on the shelf for a while.

I left the cookies on the dining table. My son had a few and ran into my room to tell me how surprised he was of the taste and how good they were. I have never had such reactions for my other cookies (I make cookies a lot). So I know they are really good.

These cookies are super easy to bake with very few ingredients. It took me weeks to formulate, but only 45 minutes to shape and bake all 50 of four different flavours. However, I will them a bit thicker because one of my testers said the Jenny’s has got a bit more bite and makes the experience a little better.

I have broken things down so that the recipe is now fool-proof. It is a fantastic basic butter cookie recipe that you can create thousands of cookies from.

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Course Snack

Equipment

Piping Closed Star Nozzle (6 to 10 edges)

Ingredients

250 g Unsalted Butter at room temperature (but not melted)
100 g Icing sugar sifted
250 g Plain or Top flour or Wheat flour twice sifted to introduce air to the flour
80 g Corn starch twice sifted
1 tsp Vanilla essence replace this with any kind of flavour!

Instructions

Preheat Oven 150C
Cream the butter and sugar to light yellow. Do not overbeat or the cookies will fall flat in the oven.
Add in the sifted flours and fold in quickly and gently.
Pipe the cookies using the star nozzle. This recipe makes about 45 cookies.
Place piped cookies into the freezer for 10 minutes to set. Don't skip this step! When you touch the cookies, they should be firm.
Bake at 150C for 20 - 30 minutes. Don't let it turn too brown.
Optional: Bake another 3 minutes at 180C to brown the cookies.
Alternative: For chocolate cookies, replace 20% of the flour with unsweetened cocoa powder.
Tips: always use the best butter you can afford (high percentage of fat) and pipe quickly as the batter gets harder and harder.