Sugar Cookies

By Danilo Alfaro

culinaryarts.about.com

Sugar cookies.

Photo © Brian Hagiwara / Getty Images

Sugar Cookies

These sugar cookies are light and delicate and they're perfect for icing or just eating straight out of the oven. For this recipe you'll roll out the dough and cut out the cookies with your favorite cookie cutters. But you can just bake little 1-oz. balls of dough for plain round cookies. A few tips:

• Chill the dough thoroughly before rolling it out.


• It's fine to dust your work surface with flour before rolling out the cookies, but don't use any more flour than you need to. Using too much flour will make the cookies come out too hard. All you want is enough so that the dough doesn't stick. Chilling the dough first will help. Or you could dust your surface with powdered sugar instead.
   
• Cut the cookies out as close together as you can to minimize leftover scraps. You can reroll these leftovers, but only once. The more times you roll out the dough, the tougher the cookies will be.

I like to use cake flour for making sugar cookies, because it makes the cookies more delicate, but you could substitute pastry flour or all-purpose flour. Whatever you choose, just make sure you use 400 grams. That means you'll need a digital scale that can be set to grams.

Also see: Royal Icing Recipe

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 15 minutes

Total Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

• 400 grams cups cake flour (about 4 cups, weighed first, then sifted)
• ½ tsp baking soda (fresh)
• ½ tsp salt (table salt, not Kosher salt)
• 8 oz unsalted butter (2 sticks)
• 1 cup granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling
• 1 large egg, beaten
• ¼ cup milk, plus more for washing tops of cookies
• 1½ tsp vanilla extract (or see variations below)

Preparation:

1. Let all the ingredients come to room temperature before you begin.


2. Preheat oven to 375°F.
    
3. Prepare your baking sheet pan by greasing it with butter or shortening or lining it with parchment paper. Or use a silicone baking mat, which is my favorite technique.
    
4. Using the paddle attachment of a stand mixer, cream the butter, sugar and salt on low speed.
5.  
6. Add the egg, milk and vanilla and mix until blended.
    
7. Sift the flour and baking powder together into a separate bowl.
    
8. Add the dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix until they're combined.
    
9. Wrap the dough in plastic and chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. Be gentle with the dough while wrapping it. Overworking the dough will toughen the cookies.
    
10. Unwrap the chilled dough, transfer it to a lightly floured workbench or butcher block and use a rolling pin to roll the dough out quite flat: about one-eighth of an inch thick.
     
11. Cut out the cookies and place them on the prepared baking sheet. Remember, cut them as close together as you can.
     
12. Using a pastry brush, wash the tops of the cookies with milk and sprinkle the tops with sugar.
     
13. Bake 8-10 minutes or until the edges and bottoms of the cookies are barely beginning to turn golden brown.
     
14. When the cookies are cool enough to handle but still warm, remove them from the pan and cool them on a wire rack. You can eat them as soon as they're cool enough that they won't burn your mouth. Or if you'll be icing them, let them cool all the way first.

Makes about 40 cookies, depending on how big you cut them.

Sugar Cookie Variations:
• For a tangier cookie, substitute 1½ tsp lemon extract for the vanilla.
• Or you could use almond extract for a nuttier flavor.
• Instead of sprinkling with plain sugar, use colored sugar crystals.
• For colored sugar cookies, add food coloring to the dough along with the flour.