The Best Sugar Cookie Recipe For Every Occasion
Sugar cookies are one of those classic recipes every home baker should have in their back pocket. Whether you’re baking heart-shaped cookies for Valentine’s Day, pastel treats for Easter, festive cutouts for Christmas, or simple rounds for an everyday sweet, this is the sugar cookie recipe that works for every occasion. Soft yet sturdy, lightly sweet, and easy to decorate, these cookies are designed to be endlessly adaptable, so once you master the base recipe, you’ll be ready to bake beautiful sugar cookies for any season, holiday, or celebration.
Equipment
- Stand mixer or hand held mixer
- Mixing bowl (if using a hand held mixer)
- Measuring Cups
- Measuring Spoons
- Rubber Spatula
- Baking Sheet
- Cookie cutters (optional)
- Parchment Paper (optional)
Ingredients
- 2 ¾ - 3 cups all-purpose flour more for dusting work surface
- 1 tsp baking powder
- ¾ cup butter room temperature
- ¾ - 1 cup granulated sugar See Notes for how much sugar to add
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
Decorating - optional
- Royal Icing
- Sprinkles
Instructions
- In a large bowl combine 2 ¾ cups of all-purpose flour and baking powder. Set aside.
- To the bowl of a stand mixer or hand mixer, add the room temperature butter and sugar. Beat together until creamy – at least two minutes, but 3-4 minutes is better. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as necessary.
- Beat in 2 eggs and the vanilla extract for another minute to get a relatively homogenous mixture.
- Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in three increments, incorporating the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients gently with the mixer each time. If the dough is still too sticky you can add a couple tablespoons of flour at a time until it is no longer sticky. The dough should pull away from the sides of the bowl and form a soft mass like soft playdough.
- 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.
- Preheat oven to 375 F.
- 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 or so smacks it will be easier to roll the dough out.
- Roll the dough out to an even thickness of about ¼”.
- 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. You can recombine the scraps of cookie dough and roll out again to ¼” thick and cut out more shapes until all the dough is used up. If you don't have cookie cutters, use a drinking cup with a suitable diameter to cut out circles.
- This is optional but you can cover the baking sheet with plastic wrap and place back in the fridge to chill for an hour, or 30 minutes in the freezer. This will make the cleanest sharpest edges on the cookies, but the difference is not very noticeable.
- Place cookies 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 Notes to learn more about browning.
- Cookies can be served as is or they can be decorated to your liking.
Notes
- If you aren't going to add any 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.
- 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 your baking sheet will also have an impactt 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 sheet pan I get a lot more browning.
- Don’t put freshly cut-out cookie dough on a hot baking sheet – they will melt and spread out before they get a chance to bake and set.
- Make sure the cookies have completely cooled before you attempt to add icing/frosting, or the icing will melt and not hold it's shape.