Sugar cookies are one of those basic recipes that you can change up a ton of ways: chocolate chip, frosted, shapes, sprinkles. All from one super-simple recipe.
Ingredients
1 pound butter (oops, only had a half-pound in the photo)
1½ cups sugar
3 eggs
5 cups flour, sifted
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
Optional
milk, sugar sprinkles
Directions
This is really complicated, so I’ll type slowly. (If you haven’t had your morning coffee yet, you might have missed that that’s a joke, son.)
Combine the butter, sugar and eggs and beat until combined, but not smooth.
Add the vanilla, baking powder and salt and mix.
Add the flour and mix until just combined.
Scoop into a zip-top bag, or wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour to let the flour hydrate.
Over a floured surface, break off a little dough at a time and press flat.
Sprinkle with a little more flour and roll to an eighth-inch thick.
Cut out the shapes you want.
Put the cookies cutters close together so you can get the most out of each piece.
Yes, these were going to a first communion party. We normally just go with “round”.
Lift up the pieces between the shapes you cut out.
Joking aside, here’s the one really good tip here: Use a metal spatula to lift them up from the counter.
If you try to do this by hand, you’ll mash the corners. A plastic spatula will work in a pinch, but a metal one has a much thinner edge.
Line the pieces up on a baking sheet.
Don’t worry about spacing them out, they don’t spread. And there’s enough butter in these that you don’t even need to grease the pan. Seriously.
If you want to add some decorations, brush the tops with a little milk, so it will stick.
We used sugar and those little silver balls.
Yes, those are little tiny hands dropping decorations all over the place.
They don’t understand the concept of restraint.
Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes, until lightly browned around the edges.
Yeah, that one in the back? We haven’t got a clue how that happened.
Transfer to a rack to let them cool, or the bottoms could get soggy.
And that’s it.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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13 Comments
If you want chocolate sugar cookies (and who wouldn’t?) replace 1/4 cup of the flour with 1/4 of unsweetened GOOD QUALITY cocoa. I’ve also taking a basic recipe, used lemon extract instead of vanilla, made small circles, and put jam between 2 cookies. Sort of a fruit flavored Oreo. The best sugar cookie recipe is an adaptable one.
are you easily able to get dragees where you are? i can’t easily find them here in florida … have a good online source?
Here’s an online store for dragees:
http://www.candylandcrafts.com/
That extra brown cookie in the back appears to be on a darkened area of the cookie sheet, which probably held more heat and cooked the cookie faster than the others.
Stephanie, we get them at the grocery store. Although if we want a particular color, there are two candy supply stores we can go to. So no, I’ve never needed an online source. Sorry.
Betsy, that makes sense. It’s pretty obvious, actually, now that you’ve pointed it out.
Every time I try to make sugar cookies they spread EVERYWHERE. Even the practically-baked-for-you kind from Pilsbury that you just cut to size and bake come out FLAT. The batch I made from scratch came out cracker thin and tasting oddly like popcorn (don’t ask how popcorn-flavored cookies taste, don’t even bother imagining it, it’s awful). What am I doing wrong here?
I suspect you’ve got a combination of things going on. First, the dough should still be cold when it goes into the oven. Second, your oven might be cooler than what you’re setting it to. Have you calibrated it with an oven thermometer recently?
The reason for both of these is that the dough gets soft when it warms up. You need the outside to bake while the inside is still cool enough to hold its shape.
Is that 1 pound or 1/2 pound of butter?
Oooo! Good catch, Wendy! The picture doesn’t match the ingredient list, Drew!
Doh! You’re right. I’ll fix that right now.
Just wondering how many dozen cookies this makes?
It made those two trays full you see in the pictures. That was about three dozen, but those were larger than normal round cookies. So I’d say between three and four dozen.
At my house we love to bake the “scraps” that are left from around the edges of the cut shapes. We gobble these up immediately when they come out of the oven.