Ingredients
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon maple extract, optional
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Sour Cream Topping
- 3/4 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/3 cup brown sugar
- 1/4 cup sour cream
- Dash of salt
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Combine topping ingredients and set aside.
- Prepare cookie dough by creaming butter and sugar. Next, add egg and extracts and beat well.
- Combine dry ingredients separately, then add to the dough and mix just until combined.
- Form dough into 1-inch balls and place on ungreased baking sheets. Make depressions in tops of cookies and fill each with about a teaspoon of topping.
- Bake for 10 minutes, or until lightly browned.
Follow these tips to learn how to make butter from cream, and enjoy mixing up a favorite sour cream cookie recipe that’s been passed down for generations.
I often end up with sour cream, because accumulating enough cream to fill my butter churn can take time — but that seemingly unfortunate situation is made palatable because of this Sour Cream Cookie Recipe from my great-great-grandmother. Cream often sours as it ages, even if it’s been properly refrigerated. Though it’ll still churn properly, aged cream may produce butter with a sourer taste than your family likes.
What steps can you take to prevent cream from souring while you’re accumulating a large enough quantity to make butter? For our grass-fed Jerseys, a treat of ground oats at milking time helps boost cream production, which also shortens the cream-collecting period. Additionally, the soured flavor of the cream is due to the production of acid. Baking soda is a base, so you can use it to cut down on aged cream’s acidic tang. You can play around a bit with quantities, but as a starting point, I’ve found 1 teaspoon baking soda per 1 gallon cream to be effective. If only a portion of your cream has soured, add baking soda only to the soured part before churning; don’t include all the cream in your calculations on how much baking soda to add. Your freshest cream must be older than 24 hours to churn properly, and your cream must be at the correct temperature to churn and produce butter of a consistency that’s easily washed (which further ensures a good flavor). Though some people report the ideal temperature as between 55 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit, I find 56 to 60 degrees produces the best results and the quickest churn. I’ve had 2 gallons of cream produce lovely yellow butter in only eight minutes! The action of the agitator will raise the temperature of cream during a churn by a few degrees. Also, a warm kitchen will significantly increase cream temperature as it’s being churned, so you can probably start with cream that’s a little on the cool side.
And now that you’ve learned how to make butter from cream, you can use your own homemade butter and sour cream to mix up this Sour Cream Cookie recipe from my great-great-grandmother. The topping melts as the cookies bake, creating a delicious candy-like layer.
