Sugar Cookie Cut Outs
The Thirty Year Journey
My parents were wonderful people but they messed up every Christmas when we were growing up. That is not an exaggeration - EVERY Christmas. Arguments over where to celebrate, discord over my Mom’s birthday being Christmas Day, challenges with family members …you name it and they used it to make our collective lives miserable for 14 days at Christmas time. Because of that I was committed that Christmas would be the best time ever for my children-Christmas was for my children and nothing was going to mess that up. Over the years I was intent on creating fun traditions for my children at the holidays. Mostly they were fun mixed in with a little Mom stress for good measure. Christmas Eve, for example, became filled with fun traditions. On Christmas Eve we hosted a pot luck/buffet and invited those that didn’t have a plan for Christmas Eve. The dining table was always over laden with food. That evening we would send people on their way with Christmas cookies we had made. I wanted my kids Christmas to be the most magical thing ever because it was not like that for me. As part of those traditions I started making sugar cookies with my children starting in 1990. Mostly my daughter Alex because the boys would mess around and eventually they went on to do something else. But my daughter Alex grew to love this tradition and as she got older the pressure to improve the outcome became REAL. My daughter is a perfectionist and an amazing baker and she moved me to continue to improve our outcome. Put another way - our roles reversed. Since starting this tradition I have gained a daughter-in-law Laura and four adorable rambunctious Grandsons. And everybody loves to eat and decorate sugar cookies.
It is important to note that my cutout cookies always tasted fantastic…but they didn’t always look fantastic. Off and on over 30 years I would try other recipes and techniques but was never satisfied with the outcome. There were reasons for that.
First and foremost was the challenge with the cut out cookie itself. My “go to” recipe was the Deluxe Sugar Cookie recipe in the Betty Crocker Christmas Cookbook published in 1982…you know back when you had to have cookbooks and there was no Pinterest with 10,000 people telling you how to do it. The Deluxe Sugar Cookies recipe delivered a genuinely delicious and crisp sugar cookie. They taste divine…but there was one major problem with them - THEY SPREAD and had sloppy edges and as our decorating techniques became more sophisticated over the years this became a real problem! Over the years I did everything imaginable to get a cookie with a perfect edge. I tried putting the cookies in the freezer before baking. This worked marginally well but was a gigantic pain in the “you know what” and it took forever to get through the process. I tried other recipes but they didn’t taste good. What is the point of a good looking cookie with sharp edges if it doesn’t taste good?! My daughter Alex never gave up and a year or two ago she sent me a link to @bakingamoment.com’s recipe for Cut Out Cookies with Neat Edges. I loved how her cookies looked after baking, I loved how much easier her recipe was. No waiting for the butter to soften, no requirement to leave the dough in the refrigerator for three hours etc. Still I kept resisting! Old habits die hard! But I am here to tell you that after thirty years of frustration I have to concede that @bakingmoment.com’s sugar cookie is a breeze to make, enjoyable and they taste really good. BUT they are best with a generous coating of Royal Icing. More on that later.
The second issue was cookies with uneven depth. Sometimes I rolled them thinner than others. It wasn’t consistent. Enter @Food52 with their 1/4 inch rolling pin. Now, not only did I have crisp (as in NEAT) edges, I had cookies that were uniform in depth.
Royal Icing. Boy did I struggle with Royal Icing. Again my baking daughter Alex found the perfect recipe. I entered this recipe in my handwritten cookbook as Best Royal Icing. Sadly I did not note who posted this genius recipe. I will search to find out who to give credit to for the recipe and technique because they changed my life and lowered my frustration level by a lot! I will cover how to make the icing and why I prefer it in the next BLOG Post.
So thirty years later I can confidently say our Sugar Cut Out cookies are amazing. Sadly my kids no longer let me decorate the finished product because frankly I suck at it. But that is a story for the Royal Icing post. Enjoy this recipe! Mangia!
