You know how all recipe posts have some story about something completely irrelevant before the actual recipe? I was gonna do that too, but I figured I’d fight the patriarchy and post the recipe first and then tell you a completely random story. So you’re welcome.
The Best Sugar Cookie & Frosting Recipe
Ingredients
Sugar Cookie
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- 1 cup granulated white sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extra
- 1/2 tsp almond extract
- 1 egg
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 3 cups all purpose flour
Frosting
- 4 lbs powdered sugar
- 3/4 cup meringue powder
- 2 tbsp vanilla (or other flavoring)
- 1 1/3 cup warm water
Instructions
Sugar Cookies
- Preheat oven to 350° F.
- In the bowl of your mixer cream butter and sugar until smooth, at least 3 minutes
- Beat in extracts and egg.
- In a separate bowl combine baking powder and salt with flour and add a little at a time to the wet ingredients. The dough will be very stiff. If it becomes too stiff for your mixer turn out the dough onto a countertop surface. Wet your hands and finish off kneading the dough by hand.
- DO NOT CHILL THE DOUGH. Divide into workable batches, roll out onto a floured surface and cut. You want these cookies to be on the thicker side (closer to 1/4 inch rather than 1/8).
- Bake at 350 for 6-8 minutes. Let cool on the cookie sheet until firm enough to transfer to a cooling rack.
Frosting
- Lightly combine powdered sugar and meringue powder.
- In measuring cup, combine water and vanilla.
- Add water mixture to powdered sugar mixture and mix with electric mixer until your frosting is the consistency of toothpaste.
- For piping icing, remove some icing and color with food dye to desired color.
- For fill icing, slowly add water to icing with a spray bottle to make the icing the consistency of shampoo, slightly runny, but isn’t too slick.
Now, onto the story. I’ve been on this essentially “nesting” phase for the past 6 months and it is still in full force. Part of that nesting phase has been me baking absolutely everything. I made 2 apple pies in October for goodness sake. I’ve basically been trying to be a stay at home mom without a husband or kids and working a full time job LOL.
All that to say, I wanted to make some sugar cookies. I know this is a tradition for a lot of families around the holidays, but not really in my family. We have so many other cookies that we make that this one is just too time consuming and normally not worth it to put in the effort. This year however, my friends were hosting a Christmas party and I wanted to bring this as my party gift! So I set my sights on making these cookies and boy did I!! I put it in a massive order at Hobby Lobby to get all the decorating utensils necessary to make this a success. Needless to say, in the past when I have decorated cookies, it has NOT gone to plan. Like horribly wrong. So I thought if I invested in the right tools, it would up my decorating game and truthfully, I think it did!
While this process took 6 hours for myself and 2 of my friends to pull off, yes we ate dinner in the middle of it and probably took a lot longer than normal people to decorate, we were exhausted by the end of it, but boy were we proud!
All this to say, this recipe was perfect, the compliments we received at the Christmas party about the taste of these cookies made it all worthwhile. The almond extract in the cookie dough I think is the magic ingredient. I would recommend not putting in almond extract in the frosting if you’re doing it in the cookie base as it will probably be too overpowering. But in one is just right.
Let me know if you use this recipe and how you end up decorating your cookies! My Instagram explore page is all decorating accounts now after looking up so many design ideas.
Happy baking everyone!
