By Suzanne Corbett, STLSportsPage.com Food/Travel Editor

Stacks of seasonal baking supplies have lined supermarkets shelves for weeks. Mountains of chocolate chips, countless cans of baking powder and sacks of confectioner’s sugar beckon you to bake.

Before making out that holiday ingredient list, don’t forget to include the quintessential element of holiday baking and cooking – real butter.  Butter is the secret ingredient that makes pie crusts flaky, sauces rich and smooth. And butter makes the season’s best  Christmas cookies that much more delicious.

To make the most out of your holiday baking the St. Louis District Dairy Council offers a few holiday tips for using and storing butter.

To ensure the best flavor store butter wrapped or covered in a butter dish so it doesn’t absorb odors from other foods. Before using, remember to set butter out shortly at room temperature so it will soften for easy spreading. Butter will keep in the refrigerator for several weeks if you store it carefully. You can also freeze butter for up to nine months providing it’s wrapped in foil or freezer paper.

For maximum flavor for cooking, heat butter before using. Heating releases natural flavor compounds, allowing butter to develop its rich full taste. Drizzle over vegetables, pasta, potatoes or broiled fish and poultry. Another excellent way to give vegetables a burst of butter flavor is to steam sauté, also called sweating.   To steam sauté or sweat, melt a pat of butter in a non-stick skillet,  add vegetables cut into bite-size pieces with a small amount of broth, wine, water or juice. Cover and steam until barely tender.

Adding a pat of butter into a sauce at the last minute of cooking will create s rich buttery taste and glossy appearance without adding a lot of extra calories.  Just for the record books, butter and margarine each have 102 calories per tablespoon with comparable fat grams.

While butter and margarine may be the same caloric and fat wise it can be miles apart in moisture content.  Different fats have different amounts of moisture. While Grade AA and A butter contains about 15.5 percent water, margarines can contain as much as 40 percent water.  Water produces steam during baking, causing cookies to puff up in the oven. After the steam is released and the item is removed from the oven baked goods made with margarine or low-fat spreads may have a collapsed or fallen appearance.

Another question that surfaces this time of year is what type of butter do you use? Salted or unsalted.  All butter is made from fresh sweet cream butter and has a smooth creamy texture. Salted butter has just enough salt added to enhance the flavor and is completely dissolved. Salted or unsalted butter is a matter of personal taste; however, many pastry chefs and bakers prefer unsalted.

Baking is a time-honored holiday tradition. To make your holiday baking and cooking extra special consider using real butter, especially in those butter cookies. After all who ever heard of giving Santa a margarine cookie.

Recipes courtesy of the St. Louis District Dairy Council and Land of Lakes

Best Ever Spritz Cookies

2/3 cup sugar

1 cup butter

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 1/4 cup flour

Heat over to 400 degrees. Combine all ingredients except flour in a large bowl Beat at medium speed until creamy. Reduce speed of mixer and add flour. Beat until well mixed. If dough is too soft cover and refrigerate for 30 – 45 minutes.  Place dough in a cookie press and form desired shapes, 1- inch apart onto ungreased cookie sheets. Makes 5 dozen.

Spritz variations:

Chocolate Chip Spritz: Add 1/4 cup coarsely grated semi-sweet chocolate to dough.

Eggnog-Glazed Spritz: Add 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg. Glaze: Stir together 1 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 cup butter, softened, 2 tablespoons water and 1/4 teaspoon rum extract in small bowl until smooth. Drizzle over warm cookies.

Lebkuchen Spice Spritz: Add to dough 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice and 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves. Glaze: Stir together 1 cup powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons milk and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla in small bowl until smooth. Drizzle over warm cookies.

Austrian Nut Butter Cookies

1 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar

2/3 cup finely chopped almonds

1/2 cup butter, room temperature .

Preheat oven to 375°

Lightly grease baking sheets or line with baking parchment.

Sift together flour and sugar; then add almonds and mix together. Blend in butter with a mixer or pastry blender. Chill dough for an hour for ease in handling.

Remove dough from refrigerator and place on a lightly floured surface. Roll out dough to an 1/8-inch thickness. Cut into 1 ½ inch or 2-inch circles (or any other shape you like) with floured cutters. Place on baking sheets. Sprinkle top with colored sugars, if desired. Bake 7 – 10 minutes. Remove baked cookies to a wire rack to cool.  Makes about 2  dozen 1 1/2- inch cookies.

HOW TO HOST A COOKIE EXCHANGE

Hosting a cookie exchange—or participating in one is a fun way to get a lot of different “homemade” cookies without baking for days. The point is you get people in the exchange and each person makes a different type of cookie and then share them.

Here’s how to do it:

Invite 8-10 people and tell them they will need to bring a dozen cookies for each person in the cookie exchange. So you night have to bake 10 dozen cookies of one type—but that’s one long baking day and you end up with lots of others.

Have each person divide their cookies into plates with a dozen on each.  Say you have eight participating then each person brings one type of cookie with a dozen on eight different plates.

You can buy cookie containers, get some festive paper plates  or even just white plates and put your dozen cookies on the plate in a 2-gallon zip lock bag.

On the day of the cookie exchange, set the cookies together on a table (or tables, as shown left) and then the participants go around the table and take one plate of each.

Later you can assemble your own plates of cookies to use for hostess gifts, neighbors or anyone you want to give cookies to as well as serve in your own home when guests come. You will end up with 8-10 plates of mixed cookies in the end.

Important cookie-baking tip from Suzanne Corbett:

“Be sure that when you begin your holiday cookie baking, you go ahead and plan to have at least one tray of cookies to be sacrificed to the burnt cookie gods. It’s ok, it happens to the best of us. It’s just part of being a good seasoned baker.”