Christmas Sugar Cookies
The warm scent of vanilla and butter filling the house - a sure sign that Christmas sugar cookies are baking. Soft, sweet, and perfectly golden, these cookies are a holiday classic at our house and are perfect for gift giving. Who doesn't enjoy rolling out festive shapes, piping on royal icing, and playing with sprinkles? These cookies bring a little sparkle and joy to every celebration or cookie gift box.
Ingredients
- 2 ½ - 2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour (more for dusting work surface) (320-350g)
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ¾ cup butter at room temperature (170g)
- ¾ - 1 cup granulated sugar (155-205g)
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- Royal Icing optional
- Food Coloring optional
- Sprinkles optional
Instructions
- In a large bowl combine together the all purpose flour and baking powder. Set aside.
- Using a stand mixer or hand mixer, add the room temperature butter and sugar. Beat together until creamy – about two minutes. See Notes on how much sugar to add.
- Beat in the 2 eggs and the vanilla extract for another minute to get a homogenous mixture.
- Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in three increments, incorporating the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients gently with the blender each time. If the dough is still too sticky you can add a tbsp of flour at a time until it is no longer sticky.
- Divide the dough into two balls and then flatten each one into a disc about 2” thick. Wrap each disc with plastic wrap and place in the fridge to chill for 1 hour (or up to 3 days) (dough can also be frozen at this point). You can also speed up the chill time by placing the discs in the freezer for 30 minutes.
- Bring out one disc of dough from the fridge. Sprinkle your worksurface and rolling pin with a dusting of flour. Place the disc down on the floured surface. At this point, the dough is quite cold and difficult to manipulate. Begin by smacking the dough with the rolling pin (not a typical baking term I know, but you just need to bring the rolling pin down on the dough with a “smack”). I start in the middle and smack it all around. This helps to warm up the dough fairly quickly, and after about 20 smacks it will be easier to roll the dough out.
- Roll the dough out to about ¼” thickness.
- With cookie cutters, cut out the shapes you would like and transfer the shapes to a parchment-lined baking sheet, leaving about an inch of space between each cookie. Cover the baking sheet with plastic wrap and place back in the fridge to chill for an hour, or 30 minutes in the freezer. You can recombine the scrapes of cookie dough and roll out again to ¼” thick and cut out more shapes until all the dough is used up.
- Preheat oven to 375 F.
- After cookies have chilled, remove the plastic wrap and place in the oven to bake for 10-12 minutes, just until the edges begin to lightly brown. Let the cookies cool for about 5 minutes on the pan and then remove them with a spatula to finish cooling on a cooling rack. See Pro Tips to learn more about browning.
- Cookies can be served as is or they can be decorated as outlined in detail in the blog post above.
Notes
- If you aren't going to add an icing or sprinkles you may want to use 1 cup of granulated sugar in the cookie recipe. If you plan on decorating with icing and sprinkles then I recommend using less sugar in the cookie itself and only add 3/4 cups sugar.
- Don't put cut out sugar cookie shapes onto a hot baking sheet. It will cause the cookies to begin to melt and spread out, and you will lose definition in their shape.
- The amount of browning on your sugar cookies will depend on a few factors. The thicker your cookie, the longer it will take to brown, so it often does not look as brown as a thinner cookie. The color of baking sheet you use will also have an effect on the browning of the bottom of the cookie. When I use a silver sheet pan, my cookies have just the slightest browning, but if I use a darker colored sheet pan I get a lot more browning.
- Make sure the cookies have completely cooled before you attempt to add icing, or the icing will melt and not hold it's shape.
- When piping and flooding cookies, you can purchase piping bags or just use a ziploc bag, or even a reasonable sized clean plastic bag like a bread bag. You don't need to use piping tips to pipe a straight line, but feel free to use them with your piping bag if you would like.