Add butter cubes into sugar and egg mixture. Can food processor cream the butter in this situation?

Question

I accidentally added butter cubes into egg & sugar mixture and it turned out grainy and unable to incorporate.I was trying to salvage the cookie dough by adding all of the mixture into food processor, and by the looks of it, it's fine. I tried one out and it tasted the same. Since I planned to bring the dough to my friend's house, I just hope the product won't be disastrous. Can food processor cream the butter with the presence of egg?

Answer 1

It should be fine. In fact food-processor-specific recipes often just throw in everything except the flour, beat (whether with a blade or something more specific), and then add the flour. They do rely on the butter being quite soft at this point, though actual melting isn't required and may be unhelpful.

You probably won't even end up beating more air into the egg, because of the presence of fat. If you did, it wouldn't be a problem.

Just watch out for stray lumps of butter stuck to the sides of the bowl. Use a rubber spatula or similar to make sure they're all scraped off and incorporated.

Answer 2

To answer the literal question: no, it can't. If you have egg already in there, the butter won't get creamed, you'll get tiny pieces of butter floating in the sugary egg liquid, which is very different from creamed butter.

Luckily, you seem to have picked a recipe which works without creaming. You're making cookies after all, not a very delicate cake: And there are in fact many cakes which will also work without creaming, they'll just have a different texture than intended - for example, Ruhlmann recognizes two different cake types with the same ingredients and ratios, but made with a different process, one with creaming and one with the muffin method (dump it all in).

If you're seeing a nice dough, it should bake properly, no matter if it got creamed. If the recipe doesn't contain leaveners, it might turn out denser than desired, but probably still edible.