I was inspired this weekend to make sugar cookies in the
shapes of test tubes and flasks. Sadly,
Center City Philadelphia wasn’t interested in selling cookie cutters in those
shapes so I’ll make them another day.
Instead, I made Jack O’Lanterns.
Yummy Sugar Cookie
Recipe (from Williams-Sonoma)
Ingredients:
2 ½ cups of flour*
½ tsp salt
12 tbsps unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 ½ tsp vanilla
Two sheets of plastic wrap
*For chocolate sugar cookies, replace ½ cup of flour with ½ cup
of unsweetened cocoa powder
Preparation Directions
Place flour, salt and – if necessary – cocoa powder in a
bowl. Set aside.
Beat butter on high until creamy (~ 2 minutes).
Reduce speed to medium and add sugar slowly. Stop occasionally to scrape down the bowl and
clean up the beater so the sugar will be incorporated.
Beat butter + sugar mixture until light and fluffy.
Add egg and vanilla, beat for one minute. Be sure to scrape down the sides of bowl for
full incorporation.
Add half the flour mixture and beat until the most of the
flour has been absorbed. Scrape down the
sides of the bowl.
Add the other half and again mix until fully absorbed.
Remove the dough from the bowl and knead together.
Split into two halves, knead into a ball, wrap in plastic
wrap and place in the fridge for 2 hours – 2 days.
Cookie Cutting
Tools
Rolling pin
All purpose flour
Cookie cutters
Cookie sheets
Spray oil/grease the pan
Cookie preparation
Preheat oven to 350°.
Flour your counter.
The recipe says lightly flour – I’m telling you to flour it. Otherwise, your cookie dough will stick to
the rolling pin and/or the counter.
Remove a ball of dough from the fridge and let warm to room
temperature (~ 5 minutes).
Roll out carefully to a sheet ~ 3 mm thick.
Tips:
Thicker
is better than thinner…
The
best technique for rolling, especially with the chocolate sugar cookie dough,
is to place the pin in the middle and roll towards one edge. Then place back in the middle and roll to
another edge. This minimizes cracking
and sticking.
Also, I
recommend flattening the dough as much as possible with your hands before
starting with the rolling pin.
Flour the edges of your cookie cutters and cut out your
shapes.
Place cut cookies on a pre-greased cookie sheet.
Knead the scraps back together into a cohesive ball of dough
to roll it out again. Directions say to
only re-roll dough twice. I re-rolled
upwards of 4 times and it was fine. Keep
going until you run out of dough or patience!
Cookie Decorating
Ingredients
Colored sugar (see end)
Powdered sugar
Decorating Tips
I used my fingers to place colored sugar on the cookies
before baking. To keep it sticking to
the cookie, I ran my fingers over the sugar and slightly rubbed it into the top
of the cookie.
If you’d like to use powdered sugar, bake the cookie first
then sift powdered sugar onto cookie upon removing it from the oven.
Baking Directions
Bake for 8 minutes.
The bottoms should be golden brown.
Tips:
Rolling the cookie too thin will lower cooking time so
keep an eye on them!
The
recipe recommends 12 – 14 minutes for bake time, but that was much too long on
my oven. I burned my first batch. Luckily, I found my burnt sugar cookies to
taste just as good as the non-burnt ones!
Colored Sugar!
I had
no idea that I could color my own sugar.
I looked all over for orange colored granulated sugar before making
these cookies but to no avail. A quick
Google search assured me that I could color my own sugar with food
coloring. Good to know!
Ingredients
1/3 cup of white, granulated sugar
Food coloring
Ziploc bag
Directions
Add sugar to Ziploc bag.
Add the minimum amount of food coloring drops needed to
create the desired color.
Seal bag and work the sugar into the dye with your
fingers. Keep going, shaking, moving the
sugar around, etc until all the sugar has changed color.
Adjust color with more food coloring, if necessary. Try to keep coloring to a minimum, however.
My cookie cutters came from Williams Sonoma. It was a Jack O’Lantern pack – LINKY.
However, I nearly bought these from Willians Sonoma instead and planned to frost my sugar cookies. Another time! LINKY.
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