How to Make Sugar Cookies with Erin McDowell

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to this episode of bake it up a notch i'm erin jean mcdowell and i am so excited today to talk to you about a very special tradition in the mcdowell family sugar cookies now for a lot of people making and decorating sugar cookies is a tradition associated with the holidays but in my family it's something that we always did in the springtime it's a really fun way to bring a little bit of color into your kitchen towards the end of winter but honestly it's a great baking project any time of year and i can't wait to dive into it today if you like royal icing please be sure to click like and subscribe so you can get in on all the cookie action first things first let's talk about the equipment we went over all the same equipment when we did our roll out gingerbread cookie episode in december we've got an electric mixer with the paddle attachment for mixing the dough small offset spatulas a rolling pin i've got a pastry wheel a paring knife you're going to use all those same tools and equipment today in this episode all right once you get all your equipment together you can get your ingredients and let's get baking this recipe is going to use the creaming method we've gone over that a lot before but i'm going to talk a little bit about how it applies specifically to this cookie recipe as we dive in when it comes to roll out cookies the mixture is a little bit firmer that's really one of the main things that's different about a drop and scoop cookie so we're going to start with our butter it's very important in this recipe that the butter is at room temperature in the winter or cooler months your butter even at room temperature might be a little bit too firm one of the things that i do if i'm not sure that my butter is decidedly at room temperature is i put it into the microwave still wrapped in its paper just for five to ten seconds it really does an amazing job of softening the whole stick but you have to be really really delicate just a little bit of time in the microwave to help bring it to that softer texture now usually what i say to do when you're doing the creaming method is go ahead and put your butter in the mixing bowl with your paddle attachment and just mix it give it a few rotations on the mixer to help let that butter break up and get into a nice soft consistency before we add the sugar now i'm going to go ahead and add my granulated sugar into the bowl and this is really what the creaming method is named for the act of creaming the butter and sugar together and it's really going to contribute to the final texture of the baked good i usually cream on more of a medium steam that's a funny sentence taken out of context sorry [Laughter] now one of the most important things with the creaming method is to remember to scrape scrape the sides of the bowl but especially the very bottom of your mixing bowl stuff loves to hide down there and not get incorporated we want everything to be homogeneous once this mixture is really nice and light and fluffy now it's time to add our egg this recipe just calls for one large egg after we mix to incorporate it we're going to want to give the bowl another really good scrape it honestly is one of the biggest differences between your bake turning out really evenly and uniform and turning out a little bumpy it's really really important especially in something simple like sugar cookies [Music] the next thing we need to add is some vanilla extract we can remember what my friend evan said you can measure the vanilla with your heart or you can use a teaspoon which is what this recipe calls for we'll just give a little a little extra all right now let's mix together our dry ingredients just a few things going on here we've got all-purpose flour baking powder some fine sea salt and ground cinnamon now this is optional you could leave this out i just usually do a pinch of this the reason that i like to add a little bit of cinnamon into my sugar cookie base i had a sugar cookie recipe passed down to me by my great great grandma it's actually also here on food 52 called great grandma mccracken's sugar cookies and her sugar cookies have several little bits of spice in them they have a little bit of cinnamon a little bit of clove and a little bit of nutmeg they mostly just taste like a sugar cookie but there's just this little bit of depth and anyone who eats them is kind of like oh what is that and it just gives this warmth it's lovely makes them smell great while they're baking you can totally leave it out i kind of do it as an homage to my great great grandma so we're going to go ahead and add these dry ingredients in so i'm just going to add about half of it mix that to combine first and then i'll incorporate the rest of the flour and we'll mix until a smooth dough forms [Music] so a really good indicator that this dough is done is when it sort of self cleans the mixing bowl and forms a ball around the pattern it's not going to be like a perfect ball but it actually reminds me very similarly to the pickup stage of bread mixing where it's sort of towards the end is going to pick up all the things on the side of that bowl as it becomes more homogeneous so you can see that here you can also see it here now once this dough comes out you can break it into a few different pieces or you can chill it just as one large block remember smaller pieces of dough are going to be easier to roll out so if you're somebody who struggles with rolling or if you're working with kids because this is a fun kid baking project you might want to go ahead and divide it into a few different pieces we're just going to go ahead and form this into an even thickness about an inch thick and then wrap it tightly in some plastic wrap or beeswax wrap whatever you've got and then we're going to go ahead and transfer it to the refrigerator to chill until it's nice and firm this might be ready as early as 30 minutes but this chilling is not only about re-firming the fat in the recipe it's also about relaxing some of the gluten so it's going to be a little bit easier for us to roll out this dough so remember at least 30 minutes i usually leave it for an hour or two or sometimes i even make the dough the day before i want to roll out and bake my cookies our dough is chilled now it's time to roll it out now this dough has been chilling actually since yesterday so it's pretty firm now unlike pie dough which i roll out straight from the refrigerator and it should be plenty malleable and all that good stuff these doughs are a little bit firm when they first come out of the refrigerator you can handle it a few different ways you can pull it out of the refrigerator and leave it at room temperature for just five minutes or so you can kind of warm it using your hand by just going around the whole disc of dough that you created or you can do what we learned in pastry school which is also a really good way to get out any pent-up aggression you have inside of you we can use our rolling pin to hit it a few times it's really a special versatile cookie dough if you roll out this dough thin and bake it until you see an even level of browning the cookies will be quite crisp but if you roll out this dough a little bit thicker and under-bake it just slightly until it you only see a tiny bit of color around the outside edge it will be a soft not crispy crunchy edged cookie i'm going to show you some of this later when we talk about baking of these cookies and you can see a few different levels of bake and see how it really does change the texture okay my dough is back together i'm going to go ahead and roll out this dough on a lightly floured surface now i've talked about before other ways of rolling out dough we rolled out my gingerbread cookie dough between two pieces of parchment paper which also makes it very easy you don't have to transfer the cut cookies to your parchment lined baking sheet you can just slide the whole parchment over and you can also use something like a non-stick pastry mat here i just roll it out on a lightly floured surface a smooth surface is best what i've got here is i have my 5.2 rolling pin and it's got these little guides and they're just going to kind of let me know when i reach the right thickness now i got some cracks going on here just pinch them together make sure there's not a ton of extra flour anywhere that you do that and then put your pin over it to just help flatten those back out all right i think i'm in a good place to start going ahead and cut out some cookies from my first little bit of dough now this dough can be re-rolled as many times as you need the texture and even the color might change a tiny bit if as you start to get into the fourth fifth sixth roll out of this dough but i'm also going to show you something really fun you can do with the scraps or you can do it right out from the get go if you want we'll talk about that a little later when we're making it pretty before you cut out your cookies lift up the dough even slide your spatula underneath it if you're too afraid to lift it up like i just did because now we know that that dough is not stuck to the surface so in addition to flouring the cutter i want to make sure that the dough isn't stuck to my work surface before i even start cutting so when you press a cookie cutter in we want to just press straight down with the cookie cutter when you've got something round like a round cutter people have this tendency to wiggle it around and when you wiggle it around you don't make nice straight edges and you could end up with little clumps or crumbles so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take all my excess away leaving only the cut cookies behind so i'm just going to ball up all this extra dough like i said most of these should just pick right up off the work surface because we already made sure it wasn't adhered before we started but if it is feeling stuck for any reason you're going to want to just enlist the help of your offset spatula you can just use that to slide underneath and lift your cookie up i'm going to transfer these to a parchment-lined baking sheet sugar cookies in this recipe specifically do not spread very much if you're trying to bake a lot of batches if it's the holidays and you're really trying to maximize the amount you're baking at a time in your oven it's okay to let them get a little bit closer the main thing you want to be aware of is you still want air to be able to get all around those cookies for even browning and even kind of heat distribution so if you've got room on the baking sheet give them some breathing room even though they're not going to spread so i'm going to go ahead and bake this tray these cookies bake at 350 degrees you're going to want to bake them until you see just a slight bit of browning around the outside edge if you're wanting that softer bake or you can bake them until they're a little bit golden brown even on the top for that crisper bake all right into the oven they go okay so these cookies just came out of the oven when we first put this dough into the oven it looks sort of dry then the heat of the oven sort of immediately takes effect and makes the cookie look shiny as the cookie continues to bake it's going to become more matte and set across the surface you can see that on these cookies that it's really evenly so across the surface if you ever see a little bit of shininess that's usually a good indicator that a portion of the cookie is still a little under baked if you're baking multiple trays at a time be sure to rotate your trays during baking rotate both the top tray and the bottom tray and also rotate the trays front to back just to make sure that you're getting even circulation about halfway through the baking process once you reach your desired level of doneness the cookies can cool down right on the baking sheet if you ever feel like you've taken it a little bit too far you can actually gently remove your cookies onto a cooling rack because if they are a little bit too crispy they're going to continue to get a little bit firmer just due to the retained heat of the baking sheet okay let's talk about some of the mistakes that can happen in this sugar cookie recipe mistakes happen but luckily cookie mistakes are usually still very delicious one is when your cookies spread too much or grow together if you notice that your cookies are spreading it could be an indicator that you need to chill your dough or that your oven temperature is off now when that happens take the paring knife and guide it around the cookies these cookies are still pretty malleable when they are warm another thing that can happen is uneven browning uneven browning can happen when your dough's thickness isn't even so again enlist the help of those guides if you need them a thinner piece of dough is going to become browner and crisper faster and a thicker piece but it can also happen due to hot spots in your oven not properly rotating the pans if you want to avoid things like that put less cookies on your total baking sheet so they have more air circulation between them so these three sets of cookies in front of me kind of show the three different bake areas you can take this to the blondest here on this end will be the softest cookie and it only has very light browning around the outside edge if you take the browning a little bit more so that it's starting to come on to the surface of the cookie you're gonna have something that's kind of in the middle and over here if you take it and let the whole thing brown really evenly you're gonna have a very crisp crumbly crunchy cookie also tasty especially with icing on top then over here we have arguably the smallest problem this mistake is air bubbles if you notice a little air bubble before or during the early stages of baking you can just use the tip of a paring knife to gently pierce the pocket of air to release it and as it bakes it's going to kind of flatten back out but if you don't notice it until after the cookie is set there's not much you can do about it and unfortunately those little bubbles and imperfections might show up as ripples underneath your icing preventing your icing from looking totally smooth so it is something good to keep an eye out for and also when you're picking your most perfect cookies maybe these are the ones you snack on while you wait for the other ones to be done [Music] all right let's talk about some ways to fancy up your cookies and make them really pretty one of my favorite ways to make sugar cookies pretty actually has nothing to do with any kind of frosting or topping at all it's just marbling different colors of cookie dough before baking to produce a really cool effect when you make this chocolate dough you just take out a portion of the flour all the details are in the recipe and you just add in a little bit of cocoa powder with the other dry ingredients here i used just a standard dutch cocoa powder in this recipe which produces this kind of you know more warm brown chocolate color but here i used one of my favorite ingredients black cocoa which produces this really beautiful intense color i have that and i also have some scrap vanilla dough from before so now to marble these cookies what i like to do is break it into little individual pieces and build a block smooshing them together and then we can knead it a few times to bring it together or you can just start rolling it out the more you knead it and mix it the more marbled it will become but remember that also means that eventually it's just gonna all combine to the point where you won't really get that streaky effect now once it's all in there you can just kind of smush it and then give it a couple needs this is a fun thing for kids because there's really no right or wrong way it's basically edible chocolate and vanilla play-doh we've got here so we'll just roll it out the same way we rolled out our regular cookies you can also use food coloring to help dye the vanilla plain vanilla dough different colors and create a similar marble effect i have a friend who's actually going to be a guest on a future episode of bake it up a notch who makes her shortbread this way she marbles multiple colors together and kind of sees what comes out so so beautiful so now when it comes to cutting out this dough normally i'm very focused on cutting cookies really close to one another to maximize the roll out but in this case what i like to do is just look for my favorite parts then smush it all together and roll it out again and see what the next stage of marbling brings after baking you can see how cool these cookies look no two of them are alike if you're looking for more ways to decorate your cookies without using any frosting you can apply other things before baking to the cookies a little brush of egg white or even just a little bit of water will help ingredients like coconut pearl sugar sanding sugar or sprinkles stick to the surface of your cookie during baking and then when you're done you have an already decorated cookie without even ever having to whip out a pastry bag when i decorate sugar cookies with my mom we would always finish them with royal icing now we dove in deep on royal icing in one of our bite size episodes last year but here's a little refresher on some of the things you need to know the right consistency is the most important thing when it comes to royal icing there's a stiffer consistency that really even holds peaks and that can be used to pipe more textural work like even shell borders and rounded pearls on the top of your cookies then there's a piping consistency where it's loose enough that it will flow easily out of the bag but it's also going to hold a line then you also have flooding consistency which sometimes is a little bit thinner than that piping consistency just to make sure you can really get a nice even coating in the center and that it will have that totally flat pristine look on the outside now remember the thinner the royal icing is the longer it's going to take for it to set so if you're working with a flooding consistency be sure to let those cookies set completely before adding any effects on to the top another thing i like to remind people that i do is i always have a skewer handy this is both helpful for popping air bubbles but also for guiding the icing to where you want it to go when you're flooding so that you don't risk over filling or over flooding the cookie and having it drip off the sides you can also place your skewer in the center of your cookie and kind of shake back and forth it helps the icing to level out and become smooth all across the cookie just gives it that little bit of guiding force to do so so today i just want to show you just for fun some other techniques you can do with royal icing one of my favorites is to decorate with royal icing by flooding and while it's still wet dip it or sprinkle it with sparkling sugar this gives an incredible texture and it also still keeps the hue of your icing behind it for a really cool looking cookie that also happens to be really simple to achieve i'm also going to show one of my favorite techniques which is called the brush technique in the brush technique you apply either dots or thin lines of royal icing and then you use a slightly damp brush to drag the icing downward creates a really beautiful texture that's sort of like lace it's great for flowers it's great for all sorts of effects and it's going to look so pretty on my cookies today there are no shortage of ways you can decorate your sugar cookies but i did just want to share a few ideas for making it pretty and now i want to see all the creative ideas you have what's your favorite way to decorate sugar cookies let us know in the comments a lot of people think of royal icing as the icing of choice when decorating sugar cookies but i also love to use buttercream buttercream is a little bit thicker and fluffier and in some ways it's a little bit easier to manipulate because you can just throw it right on with a spatula or you can even bring out your piping bag and tips and add some fancy effects whenever i think of buttercream topped cookies i always think of those soft cookies that are almost cake like they're very nostalgic for me and i love them so that's what i wanted to do with this recipe which is my sprinkle splosion cookie recipe this recipe is a little bit different than our rollout sugar cookies which i love but don't get me wrong i also love a cakier softer drop cookie it uses the creaming method just as our rollout cookie dough does so mixing it looks pretty similar the only difference is in the ratio rollout cookie dough has a higher ratio of flour so that we can more easily manipulate it and it's not as sticky of a dough then when they come out of the oven and cooled i'm gonna top them with buttercream and of course more sprinkles so remember royal icing isn't the only frosting when it comes to sugar cookies buttercream is tasty too [Music] thank you so much for joining me for this episode of bake it up and actually we dove deep into sugar cookies this is such a fun and special tradition in the springtime in my family and if it inspires you to bake i would love to see what you are making please use hashtag bake it up a notch tag me show me your creations i would love to see them as always all of these delicious recipes are available on food52.com and linked in the video description below please be sure to come back for our next episode where i am inspired by some kiddos to make some very special creations and until then happy baking [Music] usually what i say to do is just mix the butter i'm going to need to plug in my mixer again sorry

Channel: Food52

Views: 39,556

Keywords: sugar cookies, Food52, food, recipe, cook, home cooking videos, erin mcdowell, bake it up a notch, erin mcdowell sugar cookies, how to make sugar cookies, easy sugar cookies recipe, best sugar cookies recipe, recipe sugar cookies, chocolate sugar cookies, royal icing cookies, sugar cookie recipe, easy cookie recipes, how to decorate cookies, buttercream frosted cookies, how to make cookies, soft sugar cookies, crunchy sugar cookies, butter sugar cookies, sugar cookies icing

Id: wNOCMKui9ms

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 01 2022