Itsy Bitsy Foodies

Cinco de Mayo is tomorrow and if you can’t find churros, these buttery, cinnamon-sugar cookies with or without chocolate are a festive way to celebrate.

For my son’s recent birthday party {more to come on his Spanish fiesta} I made churro cookies.  In my brainstorming perfect-world, I envisioned churros con chocolate, a Spanish treat that is also found in Mexico, all over Latin America and in other parts of the world.  The tricky thing with actual churros, which are essentially Spanish cinnamon-sugar doughnuts, is that they should be eaten immediately (and no more than about ten minutes after being fried).  Even if the party had been at our house, I wouldn’t have wanted to be frying up doughnuts as guests were arriving.  With the party at the Children’s Museum, serving fresh churros simply wasn’t possible given transport time.  My next thought was to buy churros from a local restaurant, however, getting them from the restaurant to the party in a timely fashion (i.e. in under ten minutes) also proved a logistical nightmare.

So, I started thinking of alternatives.  Cinnamon-sugar doughnuts.  Cinnamon-sugar pastry dough. Cinnamon-sugar cookies (snickerdoodles).  My thought process led me to the thought of making churros cookies.  I experimented with three different types of sugar cookie dough and ultimately concluded that spritz cookies held the churro shape the best.  {For my first attempt I tried rolling puffy sugar cookie dough into logs and then pressed them with a chopstick to form the ribbed edges of churros.  This type of sugar cookie is more thick and puffy so the churro cookies held their form, but they ultimately didn’t capture the delicate nature of churros.  After that I tried piping Chewy Sugar Cookies dough using a cookie press fitted with a star tip  These have a wonderful flavor but they spread out and lost the churro shape.  *I would try these again, freezing them as I did with the spritz cookies.}

I ultimately used a cookie press with a star tip to press the spritz cookies into round, ribbed churro logs.  Even with freezing the piped dough prior to baking, they puffed up and flattened out a bit while baking.  However, they still maintained the ribbed edges and overall they looked pretty similar to churros.  When they were right out of the oven, I used a chopstick to improve the ribbed indentations as necessary.

These cookies would be a fun addition to a chocolate fondue spread or could be served with thick hot chocolate or chocolate dipping sauce.  Because I would be transporting these cookies to the party and wanted to be able to pack them up in cookie envelopes, I dipped some of them in a chocolate glaze that hardened like royal icing {recipe courtesy of Bake at 350}.  Once the glaze hardened, I packed them up in cute envelopes to match the party theme.