Best Sugar Cookies | Stories, Laughter & Love

today i want to share a recipe that's been part of every christmas i can remember here in the appalachian mountains where i live it's a recipe granny's recipe for sugar cookies as long as i can remember those sugar cookies was part of my christmas i called granny just before i started this video to ask her if she remembered where she got the recipe she said she didn't that it may have come off even off the back of a bag of sugar or something like that but she's been making them i mean they've been part of my life that as long as i can remember every christmas and i think they're better than other sugar cookies because of one little secret ingredient and you may have this recipe so you may already know what guess what the ingredient is but one of the ingredients is zest orange zest so the rind of an orange i just think that gives them such a good flavor i really love that little punch of flavor so as i said we've been making them as long as i can remember and granny would make them every year something i really looked forward to she would um you know let me help and she had cookie cutters my favorites were the christmas tree the she had an angel that was really pretty but i liked the christmas tree and the snowman and santa claus and we would make them every year we would decorate them there's lots of ways to decorate sugar cookies but we would just use sugar she would let us mix or she would mix some food coloring in so we'd have green and red and white sugar different things like that well i'm five years older than paul so once he got to an age where he could help too he started helping well we were really we're about like corey and katie when it comes to being silly my daughters we would get silly and i think as we got older and as we got sillier probably granny decided finally that that would just be our job so then for for quite a few years me and paul made them every year and that was fun lots of good memories of that too once i was married of course i wanted to to continue the tradition myself every year i would once corn cake were big enough i would let them help me make sugar cookies in the beginning it started out with i would be all excited you know it's going to be a great day of cookie making by the end of the day with two little ones i would think why did i think this was a good plan you know why did i think this was a good idea i should have never done this it's such a mess but over the years i realized all the joy that come from making cookies with the girls was way better i mean it outweighed the mess that i always had to clean up and their cookie making enterprise would always delve into silliness just like mine and paul's did you start out really good being serious and then by the time you're getting to those last pieces of the dough you just get silly start making things like sideburn um cookies that's what corncaddy would do and i'm sure me and paul had some weird cookies that we come up with too but i'm today i'm going to show you share that recipe with you though it's just my favorite i also like that it's a recipe that you can make the dough one day so that's what i'm going to do today make the dough and then the following day you can make the cookies you need to let it i think the recipe says to let it chill at least two hours in the refrigerator so you could do it on the same day and i've done that before but it's kind of one of those things you can get the if you're in the middle of your christmas bacon you can kind of get that step out of the way and then the next the following day just have the cookies to make so i was going to read you this is an old recipe book that granny had where she wrote down a lot of her hand-written things and she gifted it to me after i was married and i really love it because it's all in her handwriting but so sugar cookies it takes two-thirds cup shortening three-fourth cups sugar one-half teaspoon grated orange peel one-half teaspoon vanilla one egg four teaspoon of milk two cups sifted all purpose flour one and one half teaspoon baking powder and one fourth teaspoon salt and then you're going to bake them once you're actually at that point at 375. so granny goes over the instructions which is basically like most of all the cookies probably that you've ever made you know thoroughly cream shortening sugar orange peel and vanilla and then you add your egg you beat too light and fluffy stir in the milk and then you sift in the dry ingredient or sift the dry ingredients and then add them my favorite part of these recipes like this that granny wrote is i love when she wrote little notes to herself so she says to go on she says chill one hour so i was wrong about the two hours chill one hour or overnight either as long as you need to but at least one hour and then on lightly floured surface roll to an each end thick now that depends on how thick you like your cookies you may like them really thin and crunchy or thicker so that that part would be up to you cut in desired shapes with cutters bacon greased cookie sheet at 375 for about six to eight minutes again your oven may be slightly different so you may have to do that differently that part but this is um i love these little notes she wrote to herself that's my favorite part she says when cutting shapes press with colored sugar and make real pretty cookies so that was a note she wrote to herself wherever she found the recipe so that's my favorite thing about handwritten recipes is when people people write themselves little notes i try to write in mine so that corey and katie someday maybe they'll notice some things like that that i wrote advice on how to how to do it little advice uh on the back of this i just noticed here's this is she's wrote down this recipe in 1984 was for grape jelly but the part i noticed is i didn't know this i guess i've just not missed i've missed it or forgot it probably but she had a stamp so it said this recipe from the kitchen of evelyn losing wilts and so at one time she must have must have had a stamp i don't really remember that anyway one of my favorite little cookbooks and now i'm going to show you how to put together granny's sugar cookies okay i've got the shortening the sugar and the orange peel in to cream and i'm just going to add my vanilla and then we're going to cream that okay i'm gonna scrape down the sides and i see some orange zest right there that needs to be got in better and then i'm going to add the egg and then we're going to beat to light and fluffy okay we're light and fluffy and we're going to stir in our milk it says stir in but i'm just going to bead it in scrape down my sides again now i'm going to sift the flour and the baking powder and salt together now we're going to add the sifted ingredients to our batter that we've got in here our egg sugar and shortening mixture down my and add the rest and once the dough comes together you're done now we're going to get the dough out it's a really soft dough that's why you have to make sure that you chill it before trying to roll it out so getting little dough pieces everywhere so then you just want to divide it into in half so ever how you want to do that i just kind of try to make sure that it's all incorporated there i usually make it into a little log kinda take a knife and these are two pieces [Music] and i usually use some saran wrap to wrap it up good before putting it in the fridge so there's one [Music] here's the other one so now i'll put these in the refrigerator and i'm going to leave them overnight so tomorrow i'll show you how to do the rest of the cookies you could leave them as granny's recipe said an hour do we not have blue yeah but i thought we would just use white you want blue so our cookie dough has been chilling overnight actually and now we're ready to make cookies so this is something that me and the girls do every year so what's some of y'all's favorite memories can you remember doing this when he was really little oh of course yeah i always at the cookie dough you couldn't make me stop and i got sick every time i just always liked the different colors of sugar mixing them up i just thought it was so fun yeah and i remember the table one of those so we had a table before the one we have now and then we have one even before that and i loved that table and i liked sitting at it and i like sitting in the chairs and we were like so small that we could barely like our feet wouldn't touch the floor head was right there to the table and i love sitting at the table and and playing with the sugar and the cookies and then it was really fun to like pat it out and and get a shape and we would always kind of like be like who can get the best shape and who can make the most cookies so it would always start out really serious like we're going to make beautiful cookies even when they were little and then it would evolve into silliness where do y'all remember the year you made sideburn cookies yeah i forgot about that i do remember that and they were pretty good they looked like it would always end in silliness but it's always fun it's a great tradition one like i said that i had with granny and then with me and paul and then of course with my girls once uh i had them and they got big enough to help and i would always wonder why in the world did i think this was a good thing to let them help me because it would end up in such a mess when they were little i mean as they got older of course they could clean up the mess themselves so i mean i have to clean up yes you have to clean up your mess so what we've done is same thing that granny would do is that we just took some white sugar and we've added some food coloring to it and turned it into some different colors and that's what we use green decoration i did have a little bit of raw sugar which is just a much coarser sugar so we'll use that i said you can see the actual granules yeah you can actually see that i use that on tops of cakes and pies and stuff but i thought that we would use it for this too so since i guess i'm going to let y'all usually i let them do the cut now and i'm like the person that ferries back and forth to the stove putting them on the uh baking sheets and we're just using parchment on ours you could grease your bacon sheet i think granny's recipe we've got more in the fridge i think granny's recipe says to um actually it says grease cookie sheets but um i use parchment paper just to make it easier but either one will work great and then you cook them at 375. i better get my recipe out and double check that for it'll depend on in your oven but about six to eight minutes when they barely get the thing with sugar cookies like this is that they can get overdone really quickly you think they're not getting done they're not getting done then all of a sudden they're burned so you just got to keep a check on them but when they just barely start to brown around the edges they're ready ready to go okay you two i got more than you in here okay probably here's some i got some flour for you and there's all the ornaments cookies yes and i was right 375 and as always i'll put the in the description below there'll be a link that takes you to the whole recipe so that you can see it all if you didn't want to take time to write it down as i went yeah it is a very soft dough so you definitely got to take some flour but you put too much and it will get dry yeah i can't put too much it'll get dried out but stirring with the christmas tree so usually we'll do something you can use a spatula to get them off the board if they're too uh if you get them really thin or they're too your dough is too soft and usually we will put like a hole fill up the whole cookie sheet and then decorate do the hard work first in the fun part oh my gosh look i want to show you before all the decorations get on him isn't he so cute so you know he is cute and for uh hold up that cookie cutter katie so ones like that that have the uh backwards like have the little indention it helps if you dip those in flour if you're having a heart about that for them that often happens to gingerbread men they often lose okay williams i'm sorry you have any pain i'm gonna just kind of start blowing back and just gonna push his arm back together maybe he'll stay well i'm gonna freehand something real quick using the sharp edge of the spatula okay he's already her artist artistry artistic nature's coming out or is it going to be a sideburn i don't know what it'll be i got to decide what what it's going to be here so the thinness or thickness of the cookie really just depends on your personal preference i think granny's recipe said eighth of an inch but whatever you can make them thicker or thinner oh look at the pretty angels she's pretty gonna use the spatula she's gonna lose her wings yeah like my gingerbread man lost his own thank you that's as hard as falling apart at the edge come on don't do that what are you trying to make i don't know you'll see like a little christmas log your title [Music] oh he kept his arms you can dip those in flour too to help them at least hard to make and that ain't even a good sideburn either but that is my sideburn looks like an ear yeah i had thought about doing it here hey did you pinch the top of my tree don't you dare i was tempted to rip i'll get after you if you do that when we were kids is how it went corey tore a cookie open mine and i tore one of cory's up yeah that was when it was when i would begin to wonder why i thought it was a good idea to let you help me and it wasn't long and the tears started and it was yeah and the fist fighting started and the whippings the bad don't do that getting yelled at and time out and all that kind of fun stuff okay mom i need to go back to when we were kids and you roll out my dough because i'm not doing a good job just no man nobody's used him oh hahaha i'm first yeah yeah yeah i just about to say clean off yeah so that's another thing you have to learn not to rip the arms and legs off your cookies how dare you steal my hard-earned dough i love this rolling pin and a very near and dear friend made my rolling pin he also made something else that's on my hand he made it for me made yeah for me me no actually he did but i'm using it and i'm excited to get to use it because it's really nice and it's like the color is so pretty it's like perfect so yeah even though i'm a jeweler and i have all this equipment and over the years as i've developed my skills and got more equipment i still can't make this ring the way that he made it um and of course now it's covered in flour and dough but this ring is made out of a quarter if you can get quarters from 1964 before that i guess they would be 0.90 90 silver so that's plenty malleable enough to work with and how he did it this is what he told me it so if this was the quarter and pretend the face was here and it you know the head on the quarter was facing you you would take it up on its edge like that and he used like a little anvil or a little steel block of some kind and a spoon and he hit that edge and and took it around through there and every time he would spin it and hit the edge the edge starts to get wider and flatten out and then the insides kind of pull in kind of follow that circular motion so that's how i did it and at some point he um took a knife in there and uh and some and whatever other tool and scraped the remaining uh material out and then polished it but what he did that i don't understand how he did and i've yet to figure this out my for myself because i've bought quarters and tried he pulled he got the date to go with it so on the inside of the ring if i can get a picture i'll get a picture and put it in there it's the date and it says liberty says u.s quarter dollar so he made this one for me out of a quarter from 1937 because pap was born in 1937 and after he passed away that was just a really nice thing um for him to do but it's just so uniform and perfect and the outside is like totally smooth and he had no idea what ring size i wore and it got here and it just fit perfect and i just never took it off and you can see uh you can't see because the flower there's almost it's not a blister but it's a permanent kind of indention in line there so cool thank you yeah and ed doesn't uh make them to sell but he did do a great tutorial and i will link to that on my blog so that you can see how he made it so maybe you want to make one yourself and i will also link to katie's shop so that you can see the rings that she makes which are not made out of the quarter although she does have some you got any dime jewelry you have a dime left yeah so she's got she's been doing some really cool things with old dimes i lost his head that's okay i'll do him again it's okay i already just killed him i'll do it oh i thought you were feeling that's what that he was i cut i accidentally cut his head off by accident that's okay anyway i will link to both those so that you can see yeah you can actually made the awesome rings he made all of us one we love them he made me too i've got two and then uh also to katie's stamey creek creations i do the dimes and you could take any of those coins if you wanted and take them through a rolling mill which i haven't rolled out a nickel not a nickel no i tried that but that was too hard the metal was not right but you can take the coins and flatten them out and just use them for silver and then make anything but see i don't want to do that because the coins are so cool why waste them by flattening them out so you can't see the face anymore it decided to match mine i had to make a you know put it on yours or yeah yeah corey had to make a sidebar and a talk about jewelry people will say i mean about coin jewelry where that's against the law you're not supposed to deface the um thing but from what i understand as long as you're not trying to deface it and still use it monetarily right okay and if it's out of circulation that helps like some of this these coins um if they were made in the 30s and the 40s they're sitting in a bank somewhere or they're sitting in somebody's pocket because they want to keep them or something like that trying to deface it and then also use it right no i definitely wouldn't be doing that anyway that's a very old method the quarter one is very old a lot of older people you'll hear you've heard heartwarming stories about how they made them for their wives or husband i mean they made them for wedding rings and then i also i think it was malcolm our cousin malcolm that lives in thailand um that he made him he said he about drove his mother crazy making them because he would make them for his girlfriends so she just heard them go out to the shed to make his ring so that she didn't have to hear the constant thing and yeah yeah so it's awesome i mean to use the old coins and like i said you can you can roll them out for the silver and then just have sheet silver but why do that when you could look at the cool um another one more story more quick talking about the rings but um is that after ed did do the wonderful tutorial for me on the blind pigment acorn one of our friends decided that they really wanted to do that with a symbolic meaning like katie said uh using the birth date of someone in their family so they did that and then they made one for christmas and worked on it all year and then gifted it to that person i think it was a grandma i mean they gifted it to their grandma i can't really know anyway or maybe to their mother and it was the mother's day i can't remember anyway yeah so a really inexpensive uh present if you just you just need to know how but uh well i say inexpensive if you actually go looking for a 1937 quarter you're going to pay for it but if you're lucky enough to find one yeah and it's not too bad okay i think corey's finished with her i told you katie is chatty i'm just playing it's not a race but i did win so let's push yours back and then we'll we actually have more dough in the refrigerator that we have to do but we'll let corey let's see do it this way teddy is slow and methodical let corey start decorating hers and then we'll put these in the oven and the artist before you eat oh yeah yeah there'll be nothing left to decorate mine so i'll just have to cry over my plain cookies when paul and i were little and probably when y'all were young too we used to try to be really elaborate and we would like put different colors on the christmas trees and like corey's about to do here i guess but most recent years i just basically make them all a solid color or whatever it is and if you're worried about your sugar falling off it does fall off you can put like a egg wash or a like just egg white wash over it i've even heard of people what else have i heard of them oh i like mix water with karo syrup or something and put it over it so you could do that if you're worried about that but i don't i don't really like to do that because it kind of makes the sugar cook down into the dough instead of being on top but but you do it any way you want to of course if you look you can find a video i'm sure all kinds of videos of where people use the um like royal icing they ice them and then put the little i don't know what they're called a little decorative they look like pearls they're really cute you can do there's the sky's the limit when it comes to decorating but we just do it the way granny did it you get some phyllo dough or whatever that stuff fondue fried white fibo do i must be hungry uh fondue you can make anything make little leaves like red berries for holly and using that icing is really pretty uh and they're good i've had cookies like that but i just like what i grew up on and this is how granny did hers so y'all so they missed this part that i read this was so sweet i love granny's recipes i love all of them but i especially love it when she writes notes to herself so on this one she put when cutting shapes press with colored sugar and make real pretty cookies ain't that sweet that's so sweet pretty cookies she's so sweet every time i go down there she's like and i'll be working i have been working all day and i just look terrible and i'm gonna sit all over my face from my torch and i just look like crap because i just i'm like hard at work and she'll be like oh that's how she'll do oh you look so pretty you look so nice i just love looking at you and your sister you're so pretty and i'm like i can look so much better than this granny thank you sweetie i know she's so genuine she just loves it she is granny is genuine she is who she is and she don't really care about what anybody else thinks about it even us she'll care about it but she does her own person yeah she doesn't do it in the kind of way of i don't care she's just actually she's just kind of anxiously that right she just yeah don't even enter her mind that somebody would think something about what she would do yeah oblivious yeah she just is she just is who she is but genuine yeah totally there's not more genuine person so katie i love this i didn't know you made this it's a little house yeah i'm making ladies use how artistic i was going to make a heart but then i realized that this big old thing ain't going to cut uh corners and i was going to have to end up with one of them geometric hearts and i didn't want to do that so then i made a house when the next cut didn't do right i thought that'll be a house that's really cute so i have a great story about a house and cory and katie should i tell the story of the houses i promise i'll behave i've got i'm gonna get angry uh okay i've got all kinds of stories of course but i was robbed scared me to do it i thought i might so when katie was little she wanted to be an artist of course she is that's what she grew up to be as an artist but at that time she really thought she was going to be like a painter yeah drawer or whatever artistic that in that way so they at their school that they attended we had a fantastic pto absolutely fantastic led by jamie keener if you're watching this we love you thank you for watching this we love you i think she lives in colorado now i hope you're bundled up it's probably cool sorry katie anyway so she decided that they'd have a school-wide art show to promote the arts it was so it was just fantastic and every child got to participate in it well katie thought that of course she was she just took it so serious because this is her goal in life you know to be an artist and she just worked so hard on her projects and corey was like yeah who cares you know i'll have fun with it but whatever and i guess you were in like maybe second and third grade so corey painted this um this these houses they're beautiful you would think that they come out of a um like an artist like a gallery or something it is beautiful it used to hang in miss cindy's house in black mountain and you would have thought that she went to one of the little you know fancy artist galleries there in black mountain and bought it i just loved it anyway and i can't remember sorry katie what you made it was that forgettable but anyway hey listen where i went wrong it's always tried to go abstract so i got them oh my lord remember the glitter glue things and they ran a stick and you could put oh yeah i do remember we had that one framed too it was like this the seashore no coconuts on the seashore was the name of yours yeah so that must be the next one you wanted anyway coconut takes wrong way two years in a row uh katie worked slaved over her projects entered them kate corey was like man whatever i'll just do this and corey won i think and katie didn't even get honorable mention but with life about it now it's time katie really cried about it but i'm a sore loser well i mean it was understanding but it was a great teaching lesson because life's not fair you know you got to realize that you just pour your heart into you got to do it for yourself pour your heart into something for yourself anyway so become a great lesson over time but then later on i do have some of katie's artwork when they were in high school and you remember who was teaching the class was it miss de laurier susan delorean which is an amazing artist i have her artwork now in my video but so in her class in high school katie did a was it a charcoal is that what you call it charcoal drawing of a cabin on like a little mountain or a little hill and it's really pretty and i have it hanging besides cory's house and fantastic houses and that's what she titled it too i think just houses and you saw and it won anyway good memories those were good days but that was a good life listen that one's beautiful too you got to hold those up okay this house is about to get smashed because when i get angry no you can't you can't get angry okay we gotta put these in the oven but let's hold on your hands get the other house clean well the first house is better sugar everywhere yeah sugar everywhere is what happens to put them in the oven cory's turned out really pretty i didn't even decorate mine oh you you got to get on the ball girl okay look here's the bed i'm not showing you the other house because i'm about to eat it this is my house turned out cute and you gotta put some sugar on it so we're gonna finish making the cookies get some of them baked and then we'll show you the finished product okay our cookie making day is over for today i'm sure there'll be other christmas treats coming our way but we've got our mess cleaned up we had a good time had a lot of silliness as always but we also got a lot of good cookies to eat so me and katie are gonna try one you're gonna go for a star i think i'll go for a tree so we both got us our got us some milk in our i love to drink out of our old snuff jars these might have been my grandmother's my great-grandmother's we had some of hers or these are good i like to bite all the corners off all the points i'll just throw some sugar it tastes like christmas but i love that can you taste a little bit of orange in it oh yeah yeah i love that part i'm still really soft in the center it's really good so good so we hope that you enjoyed hearing about one of our favorite christmas traditions which is making granny's sugar cookies every year granny made them me and paul made them now me and corey and kate even made them for what since y'all were five they're 20 years old at least 20 years if you try them we hope you'll like them as much as we do and we hope that you leave a comment and share one of your favorite christmas cookie recipes with us and as always we hope you'll continue to drop back by often as we celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 49,077

Keywords: sugar cookies recept, soft sugar cookies, thick sugar cookies, best sugar cookies, sugar cookie recipe, Christmas sugar recipe recipe, Classic sugar cookie recipe, Christmas cookie recipes, Appalachia, Appalachian Foodways, Sugar cookies like Granny made, Old fashioned sugar cookies, Appalachian mountains, Celebrating Appalachia

Id: s85WnmTX-R4

Length: 33min 13sec (1993 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021