In honor of my new blog, a certain much-maligned holiday, and finally having the kitchen for my own projects after entertaining all week, I spent tonight baking sugar cookies.
I bet you didn’t expect sugar cookies to look like that! One of the advantages of the recipe that I used is that it’s very flexible. The roomie loves chocolate, so at the end of the baking I tossed a teaspoon of cocoa into the last scraps of batter and made her a few chocolate-chocolate chip cookies. That’s love, you know.
The recipe is pretty standard: Take 2 sticks of butter and a cup of sugar– beat together until fluffy, add 1 teaspoon vanilla (I always add about double), an egg, and 2 tbsp of some semi-solid dairy product. I used leftover creme fraiche from My Husband Cooks’ Creme Fraiche Clouds, but sour cream or yogurt would work equally well. Add a few pinches of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, and 3 cups of flour– at this point, I like to add chopped up chocolate bits to half. Set the dough aside in 2+ sections wrapped in saran wrap for at least an hour, roll out to 1/8 to 1/4″, cut, then bake at 350 for about 10 minutes, or until the edges are golden-brown.
Of course, most of the fun is in decorating said cookies. For the chocolate cookies in the first picture, I added a sprinkle of confectioners (powdered) sugar as they came out of the oven. The hearts above had cinnamon candies, sprinkles, fruit candies, and brown sugar on top…
…and the stars had red sugar and– my favorite– conversation hearts on them. You could really put anything within reason or nothing at all on them and they’d still taste good. I haven’t tried them yet, as I overindulged this weekend, but The Roomie assures me that they’re yummy enough to stand alone.
They better be– if it weren’t a special occasion, I’d be rolling the dough up into a “snake” 2 inches in diameter, refrigerating it, and slicing off the cookies. ^_-
