Sugar Cookies * coloring dough * rolling out and cutting cookie dough * coloring sugar

Sugar Cookies

* 1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

* 1/2 tsp baking powder

* 1/4 tsp salt

* 1/2 c. butter

* 3/4 c. sugar

* 1 egg

* 1 tsp vanilla

* food coloring (optional)

* cinnamon candies (optional)

* sparkle sugar (optional)

Mix dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl and set aside. In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar, then add egg and vanilla and blend well. Add a generous squirt of food coloring to the butter mixture and blend it in well. It should be really green (or whatever color). Add flour mixture to butter mixture. Divide dough, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least half an hour.

Preheat oven to 350 F and grease two cookie sheets. Roll out chilled dough on a lightly floured surface and cut into shapes. Place on cookie sheets and decorate with sparkle sugar and cinnamon candies (if desired). Bake for 9-11 minutes. Makes about two dozen.

The butter mixture with food coloring (left), the dough after flour is mixed in (middle), and the dough wrapped up to put in the fridge (right):

 

The dough before and after baking (left), showing the difference in color; cookies rolled too thin, where the red hots have melted from touching the pan (middle); and cookies showing increasing evidence of wrinkling, caused by putting the dough on a pan that has not cooled completely:

 

All done! (These were actually a little overbaked because I rolled them too thin):

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sugar cookies! This is hands down the best sugar cookie recipe I’ve tried, and my family has made it for many, many years. We call them holly cookies because we use food coloring to dye the dough green, then cut them out in holly leaf shapes and decorate the tops with green crystal sugar and cinnamon candies like holly berries. I’ve included all the steps to make holly cookies, but if you don’t have a cookie cutter shaped like a holly leaf, you can use any shapes you like or just cut them out round.

For this recipe, you’ll need a large mixing bowl, a medium mixing bowl, a surface where you can roll out the dough and something to roll the dough out with, and at least one cookie cutter in a shape you like.

If you want to make holly cookies the way I do, you’ll also need some cinnamon candies, and that can be a problem. These are the small round pieces of red candy that are cinnamon flavored, usually called cinnamon imperials or red hots. You can get them specifically for baking, but those are actually not very good for this recipe. The best red hots you can find are sold by Brach’s, but they can be hard to track down. I was going to order them online this year and actually went to the Brach’s website to find them, but when I followed their link to buy, it took me to an Amazon page that said they were sold out. In the end, I lucked out and found them in a small grocery store I almost never go to. Brach’s are better than the ones sold for baking because they’re much cheaper, but also because they’re flattened instead of round. Those big round baking ones tend to just melt into goo in the oven. But you can use any kind you can get your hands on, or, of course, you can leave them out. But they do really contribute to the overall flavor of the cookie.

A few hours before you start the recipe, it’s a good idea to get the butter out of the fridge and let it warm up to room temperature. You can do the same with the eggs too. If you forget, though, no problem.

These cookies follow the same basic method for most cookies, including the chocolate chip cookie recipe from our very first episode. If you haven’t listened to that one, you might go back and do so for basics about measuring flour and mixing dough.

First,