Baking – Can you use both melted and creamed butter for cookies

It depends on exactly what mean by pressed cookies.

If you mean the kind of butter cookie traditionally made in the US using a cookie press:

I surveyed the top dozen or so recipes on the web. They all use the creaming method.

If you think about it, this makes sense. The dough that will be used in a cookie press needs to be sufficiently stiff to work in the device, and yet have enough leavening to make a nicely textured cookie. It also needs to set in the oven before it spreads, to retain the pressed shape. As the creaming method leaves the fat as a solid, it meets these criteria well.

Prior to the advent of the cookie press (and still, in professional pastry kitchens), similar cookies were made using a piping bag. Not all of the types of cookies that are piped require the creaming method, although they tend to be very different types of cookie. Some of these include:

• Simple meringues
• French style macarons (which are meringues enhanced with nut flour usually, similar to a dacquoise)
• While not usually called cookies, small petit fours made from choux paste are usually piped, as are their big brothers the eclair or profiterole

I don't remember what the Lembas are supposed to be like in the original text, but whatever Tolkien intended them to be, the recipe is not for a bread-like item in the sense modern US Americans understand it. It is more comparable to waffles.

This is why it got wrong when you tried to treat it like bread. It is a batter, not a dough. The slow indirect heat of an oven is wrong for it, and it is not supposed to be able to hold its shape as a loaf. If you don't have a pizzelle iron, use a waffle iron for making them. If you don't have a waffle iron either, use a griddle or a hot pan and form and bake the lembas like pancakes, turning them during the process to get both sides baked.

Although I am saying "pancake" here, it refers to the cooking process, not to the final texture. If the chef who made the recipe knew what he was doing, the result can be crispy and flaky, similar to a dried tortilla. It will indeed be calorie-dense and durable, just like the fictional lemba.

As I don't think Tolkien gives anything closely usable as a culinary recipe, I guess that the chef just baked anything with these two qualities and called it "lemba". You can probably take any other kind of durable bread and use it as your recipe if you don't like this one. Knaeckebrod is probably a good starting point, considering that it has similar properties, and it is probably appropriate, seeing how much Tolkien was influenced by Nordic mythology.