What ingredient changes will make this cookie dough more workable? When I make a particular cookie, the rolling and shaping steps are very frustrating because the dough gets very soft and tends to fall apart when I'm working with it.  Chilling the dough makes it more workable, but I only have a short time to shape the dough before needing to chill it for another half hour.

Here is the recipe:


½ cup (110 gr) butter, softened
1 cup (208 gr) shortening
1 cup (225 gr) sugar
1 egg
12.5 oz (1,562 gr) flour
1 tsp (5 gr) baking powder
¼ tsp (1.4 gr) salt
3 dozen Andes Chocolate mints


Stir together flour, baking soda, salt. Cream butter and sugar.  Add egg, then flour mixture to creamed mixture. Divide in half, cover and refrigerate overnight.  Roll out dough into two 1/8" thick rectangles; refrigerate when not working. Evenly space mints on one portion of dough, and place other portion of dough on top; cut between mints and press edges down to make individual cookies.  Bake at 400&deg; F (200&deg; C) until brown at edges, about 12 - 14 minutes.

I can get the dough rolled out OK; the problem is in the cookie shaping (mint-adding and cutting) phase.  Since the dough is flattened out, it warms up very quickly, and I'm constantly fighting the softness and stickiness of the dough.  

How can I increase the workability (either the stiffness or the amount of time I have to shape it) of this cookie dough?  I would prefer to change ingredients - rather than my process for cooling and working the dough - for the sake of simplicity.
Sounds an like you may just need more flour. That recipe has more fat per flour than common cookie recipes - for example, the canonical chocolate chip cookie recipe has 10 oz of flour for 1 cup of fat, while yours is only about 8 oz flour per cup of fat. So I'd definitely expect the dough to be on the soft side to begin with, and since the fat softens at it warms up, as you've seen, it just gets worse.

If your kitchen is on the warm side, it's possible that you'll also need to chill in the freezer instead of the fridge, but I'd certainly start with more flour (or less fat).