Christmas Sugar Cookies
I learned the secret to perfectly textured basic cookies, and no, I’m not kidding you. Perfect. These cookies taste like they came from a store, but they’re completely from scratch. No preservatives. No weird derivatives for “mouthfeel.”
It turns out you don’t need them.
Butter, my friends. Butter and sugar and flour are the basic cookie ingredients, but a good basic cookie recipe begins with “cream the butter and sugar together.”
This is a deceptively simple phrase. What it really means is, “Beat the sugar and butter together at a semi-cool/room temperature on high speed until the butter is lightened in color, fluffy (or aerated), and UNTIL THE MIXTURE NO LONGER FEELS GRAINY WHEN YOU RUB IT BETWEEN YOUR FINGERS BUT IS SMOOTH.”
That’s a long-o explain-o, but it’s simple. Sugar and oil like each other – a lot. And if you put them together in the right proportions, at the right temperature, they become one in magical ways. The oil or butter keeps your cookie moist and smooth. The sugar gives a nice taste, but it also provides structure for the flour and keeps the butter from turning your baked good into warm goop.
Creaming the butter and sugar does not mean mixing the sugar into the butter until the butter’s not hard. It means beating it with an egg beater (if you’re like me) until your arm is sore (at least five full minutes, sometimes more if it’s cold where you are), and testing it every few minutes between your fingers until you don’t feel the grains of sugar. Try this sometime. It’s easy to tell.
The other magic ingredient is knowledge. Please, please, keep the first commandment of baking: KNOW THY OVEN.
My oven is convection. It also runs hot on one side. A good sugar cookie bakes at a fairly even and low temperature – probably 325-350 for about 8 minutes. Once you see a faint gold color begin around some of the edges of your cookies, they’re done. The middles won’t look done, but you take them out of the oven and let them sit for five minutes on the baking sheet. Then you let them sit for five minutes on a cooling rack. Magic, I tell you. Don’t let them get brown around the edges or hard in the middle or you get a hard bite-down-and-then-bite-harder-before-it-cracks cookie. Just a slight yellow on a few of the edges.
Last tip: use parchment paper on your cookie sheets.
Christmas Sugar Cookie Dough:
2 c. sugar
2 c. unsalted butter
2 eggs (large)
2 Tbsp. vanilla (YES, TBSP)
2 tsp. salt
5 c. flour
Cream the butter and sugar until no longer grainy – high speed for at least five minutes. Add eggs, vanilla, and salt – mix on medium until just combined. With mixer on low, add flour in two batches and mix just until incorporated.
To refrigerate: divide into fourths, place on plastic wrap and flatten slightly, wrap disks and refrigerate till firm. At least two hours, or up to a week in advance.
To bake: Cover your cookie sheets with parchment and preheat your oven to 325 or 350 (see below). Let your dough sit on the counter for a few minutes but don’t let it get room temperature. Once you can squeeze it without cracking the dough, lightly flour a surface and rolling pin, roll out to 1/4 in, cut out, and place shapes on parchment sheets. Bake at 325 for convection and 350 for conventional oven until edges begin to turn golden yellow, about 8 minutes. Remove from oven and let “set” on sheet for five minutes. Remove to cooling rack for at least five minutes. Frost when cool.
Lemon Sugar Cookie Icing:
(I love this icing! Not so sickly sweet, and it sets up like a dream!)
2 c. confectioner’s sugar, 2 egg whites, 1 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice. (half a medium lemon)
It should be about glaze consistency (I made a much bigger batch, so the sugar amount is a guess. You probably need 3 cups for that much lemon juice.) Put it in a ziploc bag, cut the very tiny tip off, and use to pipe outlines on your cool cookies. You can also use coloring gel to make nice even colors. Not food coloring – that will thin out your icing and it tastes gross. If you need to thin it down a bit, use a tsp. of water at a time, if it’s too thin, add more sugar (but don’t just dump it in – sift it in and then blend with your mixer or beater). This sets quickly – by the time I had six cookies outlined, they were ready to “flood.” That’s where you go in diagonals across the inside of the cookie – inside where you made the frosting “dam.” It makes a nice, smooth, pillow top effect, and then you don’t get weird drips all over the place. If you let that sit for an hour, you can add little embellishments on top (snow on the trees, lights and baubles, Rudolph’s red nose, etc.)
To present these the way I did, wait overnight for the cookies to dry. Put them in cellophane bags and tie with a ribbon.
OR, if you don’t have bags (like me), cut cellophane into squares 3 inches taller than your cookie and 2 1/2 times as wide. Fold it until the sides meet, then tape. Put the seam in the middle of the back, roll up, and tape the bottom. Voila. You now have a bag.
(I will have to draw this. Later.)
Merry Christmas!
Those look so good!! I will have to try it. My husband is not a fan of sugar cookies, but I think it is because mine always turn out to hard. Thanks!
I was looking for a good recipe! Thanks!
Thanks for the tip on creaming butter–I think I don’t beat it long enough. hmmm…I need to make cookies and try this out! Thanks again
Thanks for the recipe Becca! I have some technical questions for ya (I’m just this holiday season venturing into the kitchen).
I had butter straight from the store, and I sat there beating it with hand held beaters for like 20 minutes, while we watched The Polar Express, and there were still gritty granules of sugar.
Are you supposed to be melting the sugar into the butter?
Will you still feel the sugar,like I did?
Does it go faster with a big mixer like a Kitchen Aid vs hand held electric beaters?
I was at work and I know their oven is gas… but I cant tell if it’s convection or conventional.
How do you tell?
Also,(thanks for bearing with me)I left my dough in the fridge for 2 hours and when I took some out to bake it was so sticky I couldn’t cut out figures. I ended up add in about another cup of flour. It stuck to the counter, to me, to the rolling pin, to the cookie cutter. I ended up cutting 3 gingerbread men and pulling off clumps to roll in my hand for round cookies.
They baked well and I want to try again tomorrow, so thanks again for the recipe!
Why would it be so sticky?
Wow, Arren! That’s a huge mess! I would be so frustrated if I was promised the perfect recipe and it turned out so badly!
Here’s my guesses. Make sure it’s butter and not a butter substitute or margarine. So, okay, it’s butter and I only have a half-dead hand mixer too, so we’re on the same foot here. It took me a long time to get it really creamy, kind of like face cream, and I admit, there were still little grains in it. But they got smaller and smaller until I decided “Good enough.” You can buy ultrafine or fine sugar in some grocery stores – that would definitely pass the feel test because they incorporate much faster into the butter. But that’s expensive and I don’t use it very often. For the normal big-grain sugar, cream it until the mixture feels like a face cream, and just make sure the sugar has gotten smaller in grain, that you don’t feel it as “sandy” as it was before. 8 minutes max on high speed with slightly cool butter. It won’t be totally smooth, but it should get a lot closer than when it first was mixed in.
The butter does get warmer, but it shouldn’t melt and leave little pools of liquid butter.
I don’t have a big mixer, so I don’t know how this would affect the recipe, but my guess is that it would seem a lot faster because you don’t have to hold the thing up and move it around, but that it probably wouldn’t change the time needed. Just turn it on and walk away, you know?
If the oven is gas, conventional or convection doesn’t matter. Those are only electric terms. I don’t know how gas ovens cook – some of them heat very evenly, so you would probably do 350 for 8 minutes and check them around 5 minutes for browning. If they’re still goopy, you’re good. If they look yellow on the edges, I would turn the temperature down to 325 and keep it at 8 minutes.
If your dough was still sticky after two hours, my guess is that the fridge wasn’t cool enough. That’s often the case with a shared fridge – they keep it cool, but not cool enough. Try turning the dial to make the fridge colder or refrigerate the dough overnight. My dough is very sticky going into the fridge, but it comes out like standard artist’s clay – hard at first, but malleable after sitting out a few minutes and kneading. I knead it just until it mashes slightly and stops cracking apart when I squeeze it. It gets sticky fast anyway, so flour your surface and your rolling pin lightly but often. I flour my table and then roll it out, then lift it up and flour under it and turn the dough and roll it again before I can cut it.
Sticky… my best guess is the fridge. If the fridge is cool enough, maybe the butter? Margarine would do that to you, because it’s a different texture and substance altogether. Or if the butter got too hot, then maybe it liquefied and changed the consistency of your cookie? Nah – it’s probably the fridge. My fridge isn’t THAT cold – I keep it just above the halfway point, but still, it should be getting hard faster than that. Good luck!
Thanks so much Becca. I pulled out the dough today ad tried again. Leaving it overnight made it much, much better. I think it was still very sticky and I floured it often but the cookies turned out WONDERFUL! I found a toaster oven with options for convection or convention and I used that wile I tried another temp on the gas oven. I really appreciated the tip on frosting them. I just made up white frosting and some of the cookies got a little too much, even for the frosting ‘dam’ in the first step. I love the pillow-y effect. How can I share pictures with you?
Yay! I’m so glad it worked for you this time! Don’t worry about the icing. I don’t put up pictures of the ones that have goosh dripping down the sides…
I’ve set up a flikr group for you to share photos on. Thanks for showing! I’m so excited to see them!
Flikr group here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/greatmediocre-cooks/
Can’t wait!
Okay I tried sugar cookies and creaming the butter correctly. I have a 6qt. kitchenaid, so I figured it would be pretty quick. But I think I had the butter too cold. It was straight out of the fridge, so 20 minutes on high speed in the kitchenaid, the sugar crystals finally seemed smaller and less grainy. I liked how the end result cookie had a sort of crispy outside and soft center.
I tried it a second time with a different recipe, with room temperature butter and had similar results. However I accidentally put in too much flour, so the cookies were not comparable
After reading your comments to Arren, I am trying again today. First, I am putting the sugar in the blender to grind it finer myself–like that Chef Larry on TV who says you can make powdered sugar with his ultimate chopper. While I doubt I’ll end up with powdered sugar, I bet I can make it finer. Second, I’m using room temperature, homemade butter and my whisk attachment instead of the paddle. I’ll let you know what happens! I’m excited.