Cut Out Sugar Cookies

Today my daughter and I spent some time making and decorating sugar cookies.  Daphne’s “contribution” was mainly confined to eating dough, and then cookies, but we sure had a good time.  We decorated them as ghosts and pumpkins for Halloween.

Shameless “isn’t my baby adorable?” photo

This is by far my favorite roll out sugar cookie recipe.  I found it on allrecipes.com years ago, and I use it absolutely every single time I make sugar cookies.  This delicious cookie holds it’s shape absolutely perfectly while it bakes– there is nothing more annoying than cutting out perfect shapes into sugar cookie dough, only to have them plump and spread out into unrecognizable blobs in the oven.  This recipe, if followed correctly, will not do that.

I iced these with another allrecipes recipe, a new one I tried out for Sugar Cookie Frosting.  I was hesitant to use shortening instead of butter in frosting, but was lured by the reviews that you could stack these on top of one another without messing up the frosting (this did hold true). 

The verdict: This frosting was okay, but personally, I’ll take the gooey delicious butter frosting next time, and risk having messier cookies. 🙂 For that frosting, just substitute the shortening for room temperature butter.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups butter, softened
2 cups white sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

Directions

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight).

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.