Mia Bakes: German Cookies VS Jenny Bakery Butter Cookie Remakes

And so recently there was a huge craze over the Jenny Bakery butter cookies that has entered our local market, priced as a good 2 times the original price in HongKong, and I was thinking, "No way I'm going to buy that!"

However, the rave seems all too good to be true and so I started googling for "Jenny Bakery Cookies remakes" like how I stumbled onto the shiroi koibito recipe, and came across pages after pages of copycat Jenny Bakery cookie recipes. And somehow at the same time, P introduced a German Cookie recipe to me, mentioning that those Jenny Bakery butter cookies tasted really similar. A study of the two recipes only gave 2 slight difference. One with a higher butter ratio and use of different starch. So taste wise, I reckon there shouldn't be that much difference (just perhaps the one with more butter will smell/taste more fragrant). But will using corn starch/flour produce a much different texture as compared to using potato starch? 

Let's find out.

To make German cookies, the recipe was pretty standard and here are the ingredients you'll need.

125g of soften butter 

(I used Golden Churn Tin butter)

40g Icing Sugar

125g Potato Starch

80g Cake Flour

(I used Top Flour)

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

Optional: I added Noel Red food colouring to differentiate between the two cookies. 

The recipe for Jenny Bakery butter cookies, however, had quite a variation and I decided to follow MissTiamChiak's recipe as follow.

200g of soften butter 

(MUST use Golden Churn Tin butter)

50g Icing Sugar 

(increase if you prefer sweeter cookies)

50g AP Flour

100g Top Flour

50g Corn Flour/Corn Starch (NOT Cornmeal)

Procedure to make the cookie batter for both cookies are exactly the same. First you cream the butter with sugar (add in vanilla extract, if desired) and then fold in all the sifted dry ingredients and just combined. 

For both cookies, due to relatively high butter content, I've very kiasu-ly kept the entire tray of shaped cookies into the freezer while my oven heats up, and pop them straight into the oven to bake, while they're frozen. 

For my Noel Red German Cookies (which turned out PINK), I baked them in my oven for 170 degree Celsius for 20 minutes and I was pretty glad to see that they haven't spread much. 

As seen, the German Cookies baked using potato starch (and also lower butter content to higher starch content) hold their shape really well. There was really minimal spreading of the cookie, which makes it a no-no for drop cookies as it'll just bake into whatever shapes you've dropped the batter as. However, due to the softness of the batter (even if you chill it, it still gets 'melty' pretty quickly in our hot climate), it's also a no-no as a cut out cookie. So the best bet would be to hand shape each cookie and press them down with a fork. I do believe spritz cookie will be an alternative if you MUST have pretty looking cookies. 

As for the Jenny Bakery butter cookies, I first followed MissTiamChiak's recommendation of baking them at 180 degree Celsius under my watchful eyes as I did notice that the frozen batter melts down so quickly like there's no tomorrow. True enough, within 5 minutes, my cookies (which I've laid them about 1.5cm apart) were almost touching each other and there's even a circle of melted butter BUBBLING around each cookie. So I quickly cranked up my oven temperature to 190-200 (pointer was somewhere in between) degree Celsius for the cookies to bake till set quicker. And only after I notice that the cookies are more or less set, I cranked back down the temperature to 170 degree Celsius and in the final 5 minutes of baking, moved the tray from middle rack to upper rack for the top part to brown. 

Well, judging from the high butter content, it's no surprise that the cookie spreads quite badly. And with the soft, near flowy batter, this can be a pipe-out cookie, but with the high spreading, will render your piping efforts useless as they will eventually spread into a 'blurry' mess. So a good oven is really important if you wish to pipe your cookies into those with pretty looking frills, or you might have to tweak the recipe a little for them to hold their shape better. (Eg. adding in some high-gluten flour.)

I'm not exactly sure if it's the starches that makes all the difference (I'm thinking it's also the butter and amount of starch used too). But cornstarch is known to be one of the lightest starches and although cornstarch is usually said to be interchangeable with potato starch, there's still some distinctive differences between them. For example, cornstarch will add more crispiness to the baked goods, and this was really evident between the two cookies when they just came out of the oven. However, after letting both cookies sit out on the counter for a few hours to cool, the German cookies still retained their crumbly texture while the Jenny Bakery remakes lost part of the crispiness and added on some softness. 

So ultimately, which one do I prefer? It's German Cookies FTW. 

Till then,

Mia Foo