Cream powdered sugar and shortening together in mixer. Beat this mixture on medium speed for five minutes.
Add vanilla and beat until blended
Add flour and salt into the creamed mixture.
Add walnuts.
Let dough sit for one hour!
Turn this mixture out onto a lightly floured surface. Dust more flour across the top of the dough. Your dough will be slightly sticky. With your hands or a scraper mix more flour into the dough mixture. Your dough needs to be soft but pliable..not sticky. Don’t over add flour. You want it to be like a good sugar cookie dough.
Roll dough out about 3/8th of an inch thick. Cut into circles. Place on ungreased cookie sheets.
Bake at 375 degrees for eight minutes.
Cookies will be white.
Allow cookies to rest on hot sheet about 3-4 minutes ..then remove to rack.
Let cool
Cookies are better after sitting at least one day.
Carole also said that a second batch using the pastry flour has air pockets just like the original cookies.
The following is an email exchange with Mike who has been attempting to perfect the Angel Food Cookies home recipe. This is his latest success and he said that the flavor and consistency are spot-on now. I hope you can enjoy similar success.
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From: Mike Subject: RE: Mitchell Bakery “Voice News Article”
Date: October 26, 2020 To: Don
Wanted to give you an update on my latest attempt. Followed your suggestion and used the following ratios:
Let the dough sit covered for one hour, then rolled/cut and baked for fifteen minutes at 350 degrees.
The flavor and consistency are spot-on now; just need to work on getting them “hollow”. Thinking I’ll need to roll them out thicker, and maybe cut them larger in diameter, as the thicker ones had more air in them (see photos).. One other option will be to measure out the ingredients by weight rather than volume, as you suggested.
As far as the weather goes, it was 12 degrees outside and 60% humidity; inside, it was 70 degrees and 3% humidity.
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2020 To: Mike Subject: Re: Mitchell Bakery “Voice News ArKcle”
Hi Mike,
I have been discussing your questions with my sisters. One possibility is that it was because it was a rainy day. Dad use to mention that he had to be a weather forecaster to know what to make. Some recipes don’t work in certain weather conditions. Although, we are not sure if Angel Food Cookies is one of those recipes.
The other thing we noticed is that most cookie recipes there was more flour than shortening, and in the Angel Food Cookies there is more shortening than flour. I also tried searching the web for Angel Food Cookies recipes. I only found one recipe that made it from scratch and didn’t use the angel food cake mix. It called for 3 1/2 cups flour and 1 1/2 cups shortening. So I would recommend you try doubling the amount of flour in your next batch.
Yes the cookies were rolled out and cut with a cookie cutter. If they were a little greasy and hard to handle, we use to put a little flour in our hand and throw it across the rolled out dough. The bakery only had one huge oven and everything was baked at 350 degrees. With such a large oven, it was very hard to adjust the temperature.
Since it was rainy day here today, decided to take a run at these cookies. Here are some of the issues we ran into:
Even though we followed the home recipe conversion, the dough was extremely “greasy” due to the volume of shortening, and hindered the handling of it going forward. We did let it stand for an hour per your instructions to try to achieve the hollowness of the cookies.
The instructions say “cut with cutter”; is the dough to be rolled out and cut with a cookie cutter, or does this reference some type of machinery used at the bakery? In any event, the dough was so sticky, I don’t think this would have been possible unless it is to be chilled in advance.
We tried three methods: Forming balls with a ice cream scoop and baking, flattening the balls with a chilled glass to either 1⁄2” thickness or 1⁄4” thickness and baking. In call cases, they were done on the inside, but still greasy on the tops and bottoms (we set our oven at 350 degrees and baked anywhere from twelve to fifteen minutes in all cases). Flavor in all cases was how I remember.
Appreciate your help; looking forward to your feedback.
