Making Sugar Cookies

As usual, I went on a holiday cookie binge this past December. I made peanut butter blossoms. I branched out into a couple of bar cookies - m&m bars. And, of course, I made sugar cookies. After years of trying out different recipes, I think I've found the one I like. It's based off of Alton Brown's Sugar Cookie recipe.

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 tablespoon milk - (go a little shy on this (you'll see why at the in a bit)
• Powdered sugar, for rolling out dough
• 1/2-1 teaspoon of vanilla (this is my addition to the recipe

It's your typical cookie recipe: sift together the dry ingredients, cream sugar and butter, mix wet ingredients, gradually add dry ingredients into the wet ones. Put the dough into 2 equal disks and refrigerate. (I do this overnight, but you should do this at least for a couple of hours.)

Roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thick and use your cookie cutters. Bake at 375 for 7-10 mins (depending on size and thickness).

Then you decorate!

I used a royal icing:

• 3 T of Meringue Powder
• 4 cups of confestioners' sugar
• warm water - at least 6 T, but really have more on hand

Mix the dry ingredients and then gradually add the warm water. Stir it in completely, stopping to check consistency as  you go along.   Once you get it to the consistency you want, divide the icing and add color gels to get different colored icing.

As you can see, I went a little overboard on colors and decorations this year.

I found that if it was smooth enough, you could do this lovely design that reminded my of venitian paper. Basically, you choose a a color as the base of the cookie, put another color frosting as stripes on top, and then, with a toothpick go back and forth. The icing has to be runny or it won't work well. The cookie gloves are a really good example. 

In the past,  I have invited friends over to help decorate. With the move, I wasn't really able to do that, but next year I hope to. It's more fun that way and decorating 2 dozen cookies can be taxing after awhile. Still, I want to get better. That means actually piping borders and using tips to decorate rather than a butter knife.

We'll see how spring sugar cookies come out.