Let's talk about butter...

Once again, I must warn you...I am by no means, a professional cookie decorator!  I'm learning as I go, and my newest lesson is about butter.  When I first started making and decorating cookies, I just went to the local grocery store and bought Breakstone's All Natural Unsalted Butter.

I soon started to realize that I was going through ridiculous amounts of butter.  So what's a girl to do?  Take a trip to BJ's!  It was perfect...I had a coupon for Land O' Lakes Unsalted Butter AND I could buy it in bulk!

Fast forward a couple of weeks...

I'm getting really annoyed at my cookies.  They're spreading and not holding their shape well, AND I'm seeing these unsightly dark spots on the icing after it's dried (it looks almost like grease stains).  The really annoying part was that the cookies looked great as they were drying, but the next morning, BAM! Dark spots appeared all over my cookies (it was really noticable with the darker icing).  What the?!

So, I'm going through my head, trying to figure out if I changed any ingredients.  Nope!  Well, after having three children, my mind isn't what it used to be, so I'm not sharp like a tack...more like sharp as children's scissors.  Anyway, I finally figured out that the ONLY thing I switched was the butter.  I immediately ran to Shop Rite and bought about 5 boxes of Breakstone's (never mind the 5 boxes of the Land O'Lakes I still have in my freezer!)...I did a trial run with a batch of cookies, and DAMN those cookies held their shape!  I also did a little research about the dark spots and found that it might be the butter seeping through into the icing.  Just to cover all my bases, I now add a layer of paper towel on top of my cooling racks, so it will absorb some of the excess butter grease...

 

Of course this all happened right before I had an order of 80 cookies for a surprise party to get done...and the icing was DARK!  I had those babies isolated on my lined cooling racks, under a fan all night.

 

 

 

And guess what?  No spots!!!