Cameo Tea Cookies

Cameo Tea Cookies from the second Grand National Pillsbury Bake Off 1950 by Miss Ester Potenburg, Pasadena, California.

"Tender white cookies with a pretty cameo of chocolate on top.  And you mix only one batch of dough."

These cookies have a fun look to them and in theory should be easy to make.  They are just Spritz Cookies but I had a hard time getting the small chocolate designs onto the white cookies to make the 5 dozen it promised, which certainly did not happen. It's also hard to see if the chocolate cookie design (my cookie apparatus has several designs on one disk) is centered well over the white cookie and working on a cookie sheet with an edge adds an additional strain. I only was able to get maybe 3 cookies to look halfway decent and at some point gave up and marbleized the chocolate and white dough together and made mini cookies instead.

I have a couple of other spritz cookie apparatuses that do single designs which may be easier to see around but their design is much larger...I doubt if I would try this one again.  Also the flavor is bland.  And I am not buying a special edge-less cookie sheet...no way.

They do look really neat if you can get it to work right.  Here's a couple of fun ideas I just pulled from my brain: a red background cookie with a green spritz tree on top or a white background with a blue snowflake on top.  Or make a batch using the odd camel pattern on the top in any colors.  What was that one even intended for?!  I guess camels were a popular animal during the mid-century.  Two of my three spritz contraptions have a camel cookie setting.

{These cookies are one of six Grand National Pillsbury Bake Off winners that I baked for Christmas gifts as shown in this Good Housekeeping magazine ad from December 1951.}