Best Sugar Cookie Recipe Cutouts

Yup… any.

My little one INSISTS on doing hearts with loads of sprinkles for Valentines Day…. but I’ve done Hearts, Snowflakes, Turkeys, Soccer players, Dinosaurs and even Palm Trees (it was a Tiki Party).

 Best Sugar Cookie Recipe Cutouts

Basic Sugar Cookies

• Makes 3-4 dozen, depends on cutter size
• Prep Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
• Total Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

This is it. Super basic recipe, ingredients are simple- flour, sugar, butter and eggs. Oh, and of course, some real vanilla.

Some Extra Tips-
Technique is what makes this cookie great.
-Chill the dough an hour before working.
-Lightly flour the rolling surface and rolling pin
-Roll out only a little at a time.
-Roll from center outward, gently, don’t smoosh edges
-Flip dough a few times during rolling process
-You are looking for a 1/4 inch thick layer
-When cutting cookies, cut them as close to each other as possible, you don’t want to have to re-roll the dough to often
-Cool the cookies completely on a rack before decorating them

Ingredients

• 1 cup Butter… don’t even THINK about using margarine
• 2/3 cup granulated Sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 2 1/2 cups unbleached sifted flour -sift before measuring
• ICING
• 2 cup powdered Sugar
• 4 or 5 tsp. lemon juice
• Assorted Sprinkles

Instructions

Cream together butter and sugar until light yellow. Beat in egg. Add vanilla.
Slowly add flour (slowly, or you’ll get a face full of flour)
Mix until totally combined
Chill dough for an hour at least.
Alternatively, at this point you can form the dough into a disk, wrap it in plastic wrap, and stick it in the freezer for another day.
-Be sure to label it-name and date, otherwise you could reach into your freezer a few years from now and wonder what the heck it is
(By the way, if you do happen to find a several year old frozen disk of cookie dough, don’t bake it, let the kids play hockey with it)

Heat oven to 350

Lightly flour your rolling surface. Marble or granite is ideal. Tile, not so good. Pick off a piece of the dough about the size of a small apple, and flatten it into a disk. Flour your rolling pin. Roll the dough from the center out. Apply even pressure. DON’T press too hard, or the dough will become one with the counter top. Flip the dough about half way through rolling process to make sure it’s not sticking. When you have a 1/4 inch thickness, you can cut out the cookies.

Take your favorite heart shaped cutter, and cut. Keep them close together to eliminate lots of scraps and rerolling. Put the cut cookies on a baking sheet. Gather up the scraps, add some more dough, and do it again and again until the dough is used up.

Bake each tray 10 minutes.
Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets for a minute or two, then transfer to a cooling rack

When cookies are COMPLETELY COOL (don’t rush this, it won’t take long)

Sugar Cookie Icing
In a medium bowl, mix powdered sugar with 4 to 5 tsp of lemon juice, check the consistency. You want it to look like Elmer’s glue. If it’s too thick, add a few teaspoons of milk. If it’s too thin, add more powdered sugar.

Decorate
Put a wire rack over a cookie sheet to collect drips, you can cover the sheet with parchment or wax paper to ease clean up.
Dip the top of a cookie into the icing (don’t let it fall it!), scrape off the excess, and put it on a the wire rack, cover with sprinkles

Let the icing get solid before removing them from the rack

Dough-

How Much Should You Roll?Only roll a little dough at a time. It’s easier to control, and much less frustrating to work with.

If it’s too sticky, add a LITTLE bit of flour.

Roll to 1/4 inch

Cutting Cookies

Save yourself some work, cut the cookies close to each other.Don’t use wildly crazy cutters that have lots of corners and edges, the shape will blur during baking. Simple shapes like hearts, are perfect.