I made the NFSC recipe for the first time last week. I did not need 5 dozen cookies so I cut the recipe in half. Is this why it failed?

The dough was dry and crumbly, I had to constantly keep putting it in the refrigerator to chill again. If I rolled it more than twice it was hopeless.
I used a fourth of the dough at a time. Keeping the unused portion in the refrigerator. If I had any dough left from the fourth I had rolled and cut it would not mix in well with the fourth that I had kept chilling.

The cookies were breaking going from counter to cookie sheet, from cookie sheet to cooling rack (after 10 minutes cooling from coming out of the oven)from cooling rack (after being completely cool) to my dipping them in my sugar icing then back to the cooling rack. Basically every time I touched them I had breakage. Out of three dozen cookies I only had 1 1/2 dozen left after all the breaking.

I need to make a cookie bouquet but am hesitant about using this recipe again without some direction.

Can anyone help me?

Humm.... sounds to me like maybe you forgot some of the liquid ingredients or the butter was not mixed throughly. I've never halved the recipe. I make the full recipe and freeze what I don't use.

I make this recipe all the time and find if you dont leave it to mix long enough this is what happens. If you are worried about over mixing in the mixer, turn it out and nead by hand. I divide the dough into 4 balls and work with one at a time. I also roll it out onto was paper and chill it like that. I find it is way better to work with when I chill this way.

Hope this helps

You may have used too much flour. Next time you make this recipe, add the flour slowly and check the consistency of the dough. You may not need all the flour that the recipe recommends.

Thank you for the replies. I since learned that I could freeze the dough so I will not halve the recipe again.

Regina

So sorry you had a problem - I use this recipe all the time and I love it! I hope you don't give up on it quite yet!

I halve the recipe all the time, so that is not the problem (unless you accidentally didn't cut one of the ingredients in half or something). In fact, I almost never make the full batch - if I need that many cookies, I make it in 1/2 batches anyway, because I think the last bit of flour gets better incorporated if there's plenty of room for it in the mixer bowl.

I think possible culprits (as others have said) could be that you had to much flour (how did you measure it? Did you "scoop" with the measuring cup? If so, that could be the problem), not enough liquid ingredients, not creaming the butter enough, or not mixing the entire dough together enough at the end. I mix my dough until it comes away from the sides of the bowl and is one "lump."

I also roll it out between wax paper before I chill it... that way I don't have to worry about rolling the chilled dough and can cut it out directly after it's cold.