How To Make The Best Sugar Cookies

it's cookie season y'all that time of year where you're making a whole lot of cookies around the holiday season is there anything more iconic than sugar cookies we're going to give you our tasty tested sugar cookie recipe complete with everything you need to have some darn good sugar cookies this holiday season [Music] all right so let's get started so we're going to make our dough first we're going to use room temperature softened butter listen that is not melted butter melted butter is not the same and we go we want a really pale color so that's why we're using white sugar here and this is a secret ingredient i know it doesn't look like cream cheese but it is cream cheese and this is going to give us a little bit of like a savory flavor and a little bit of tanginess as well what we're trying to do is cream the sugar and the butter together so if you're feeling a lot of granules when you stick your finger in there that's not good we're trying to kind of almost dissolve the sugar in the butter so we're going to whip these together for about five minutes they're going to be much paler in color when we're done it's going to be much fluffier so like you'll see a visual change that's just whipping in air to that butter and sugar and then don't forget to scrape down your bowl to make sure that you are incorporating all the ingredients equally so now you can see we've got a really great creamed butter and sugar we're good to go at this point we're gonna add one egg two egg yolks and our second secret ingredient is a combo of extracts i think like vanilla is pretty common in sugar cookies but we are going to add a little bit of almond extract as well a little bit goes a long way it's a pretty powerful flavor but it really adds something extra to these sugar cookies and it's really delicious like you're going to taste the difference and to that we just want to make sure that all that liquid is well incorporated into the butter and sugar so once we have the liquids well incorporated we're gonna add a little bit of kosher salt here again not to make it salty just to be a flavor enhancer and balance out that sweetness and so now we've got that in there we're gonna add our all-purpose flour and next goes in a little bit of baking powder and this ingredient is our third little secret ingredient for this recipe cream of tartar cream of tartar is actually what's left over in the barrel after wine making and it's basically like just an acidic ingredient so you're adding this and this is going to help with a few things it's going to give us like a really cool texture in the end and it's also going to prevent the cookies from browning too much so i'm going to fold in just to get it started because there's a lot of flour in here i don't want to make a huge mess so i'm going to fold to get it started finish incorporating it with the beaters because it is a pretty dense mixture there's a little bit of flowery bits that aren't fully incorporated that's fine again to have like a really flaky and snappy cookie you don't want to overwork this mixture so you're kind of like just incorporating the flour you don't want to go much more than that this dough is almost kind of similar to like a pastry where you want to keep it cold all the time there's a lot of butter in here so if it gets too greasy it's going to be really really hard to work with and you're not going to have really clear defined shapes dough goes on with some cling film and then you can use the cling film to kind of like pull the pieces together it's just like kind of sticky so this is a really easy way to not make a huge mess so this is going to go into the fridge and then we will roll it out in about two hours here are a few things you might need for rolling out your cookies you need a rolling pin or a wine bottle whatever you have at your house and then something to measure the thickness with a ruler or our fourth little trick of this video which we'll get to later if you are making a lot of cookies or you're like an avid baker they do have these like kind of cool rubber rolling pin thingies i don't know what you call them like a rolling pin stoppers guards maybe it really makes sure that you get like that perfect quarter inch but you have to have like the perfect size rolling pins and you have to buy them they're specialty so we're going to show you a hack so the enemy of rolling out anything is sticking to the surface that you're working on so have a little bit of flour nearby as you remember we want to keep our dough super cold so i'm going to work in batches i'm going to put half of this back in the fridge and only roll out half at a time all right so this is the trick that we learned in culinary school you really want an even quarter inch all throughout to get the most even thickness you want to press down on your dough like this and it just kind of spreads it before you want to get into rolling every so often you wanna do like a quarter turn and that's going to help make sure that you have an even roll as well as to ensure that it's not sticking to the surface this isn't like pie crust where you really have to be careful about the shape that you're making or whatever this is just kind of a free-for-all so i'm to a good place i'm not really sure how thick mine is so how do i measure this you could use a ruler but you know what's so annoying about this ruler is like why does the zero start so far up the ruler it's not so annoying but how else can you measure bottle caps i was looking all over the kitchen for something else that's a quarter inch i like to lay these around the dough while i'm rolling out just to make sure that all sides are that perfect quarter inch the other thing too is pour out that extra bench flour and that's what we're going to use to flour our cutters to make sure the cutters aren't sticking too much to the dough so dip the cutter all the way in flour dip off the excess and then go ahead and then just give it a little like jojo a little shimmy to make sure that you've totally made contact with the surface on the bottom and if you have enough cutters what i like to do is go ahead and put all the cutters down and leave them and that makes sure that nothing's pulling or tugging and you get a really clean shape every time and now you can start pulling them out sometimes the cookie comes with the cutter and sometimes it doesn't so i like to kind of move around pull off the excess put it off to one side save that dough because you can use that again just be careful that you're not like pulling or tugging at everything because you really want the shape to be really clean and then look at that so you can definitely reuse these scraps what you want to do is get them back into like a cohesive dough ball and then put them back in the fridge they're really warm after all that rolling and working with them so get the cold one out of the fridge and put that one back in there for another like 20 minutes or so so it can firm back up and there we go if you have some shapes that are smaller than the other ones i would put those off to the side so that if you need to pull them early you can so that they don't over bake okay put these guys in the fridge you put them in the oven now they're going to spread way too much they're not going to have a clean shape they will come out super clean super crisp as you can tell they're still very pale and they haven't spread that much yay go ahead and take them off and let them cool completely on a drying rack time to decorate so we chose royal icing because it sets a little bit harder if you're going to be really crazy with decorating royal icing is definitely the way to go so despite its royal name royal icing is pretty simple so all you really need is some sifted powdered sugar you might need a little bit of water a bit of salt an extract if you'd like it and egg whites the thing about this is that we will be consuming this so you really want to make sure that you're buying pasteurized egg whites so they're safe for everyone to enjoy or you can use meringue powder which is an egg white substitute we might need water it kind of depends on what we're going for but first we're going to add salt and a little bit of vanilla for flavor i'm going to put this off to the side so all the liquids we're going to put on one side of the powdered sugar and i'll show you why in a second make sure to shake those egg whites ahead of time and they go again making sure that they're on one side of the bowl and so now i'm going to just work in that one part of the bowl and just slowly incorporate more of the powdered sugar as i go that's gonna help make sure that i have a really smooth icing if you're trying to incorporate all that powdered sugar at once it's just like a little bit harder to work with and also you probably will get some lumps royal icing is all about consistency so depending on how you want to decorate yours there's kind of like two consistencies that you're going for there's a thicker consistency for more of like lining things out or like borders of things and then there's a flood which is going to be just a thinned out version and that water is going to come in handy when we're looking for that flood consistency so we're starting here with a thicker royal icing we're also gonna add coloring to this which will thin it out a little bit too so air on the side of thicker when you're getting started so we're gonna separate the icing into a few different bowls if you're going to be doing a lot of decorating or using a lot of different colors it's probably worth it to double or even triple this recipe go ahead and put in your gel food colorings to get really really bright colors the thing that's cool about royal icing is it sets right so like it'll set kind of hard even in this time while we're trying to get everything set up you can already see a little bit this kind of skin that forms on top so you do want to work a little bit quickly with royal icing or else cover it with cling film and then just to fix it just add a little bit of water and stir so now we can do one of two things with this flood consistency flooding or dipping just go ahead and put the cookie dip it in the icing make sure it's really well coated knock off any excess and then it's going to kind of settle into the cookie and be a really smooth and even shape and then to flood what you got to do you want like a thicker frosting and a piping bag and then go ahead and just trace the outside with whatever color that you're doing and then you want to let this harden for a little bit before you go to the next step but once it is hard all you need to do is take that thinned out icing and you can either spoon it in like i'm doing or you can also put it in a piping bag and pipe it in and then use the toothpick to spread it out evenly that bit that you piped in the beginning is dried so it kind of acts as like a wall or a border to ensure that all that icing is staying inside if you're going to put sprinkles on it go ahead and put the sprinkles on when it's wet but if you want to decorate over that go ahead and let that set for a good like 10 15 minutes or so and then you can continue decorating on top of it so kind of depends what look you're going for and as you can see like these dots are kind of settling on top of it and not really falling into that flood and then if you want to decorate anymore or put any other like toppings on top of it you're going to have to layer more icing on just to make sure that they stick there's like something magical about this baking cookies it's kind of like what gets you ready for the holidays right like you know it's the holiday season when it's time to bake the sugar cookies and it's time to decorate them and you know people really appreciate the time and effort that goes into like a home decorated cookie and like does it look like a professional no but that's not the point you know the point is that you took the time you did it you put in your love and care there's like no better way to bond with your friends and family than doing something tangible diy and creative like this go make some send us your photos have you ever seen a cuter cookie cutter oh my god i can't say that three times fast cuter cuddy cooker a cute have you ever seen a cuter cookie cutter in your life i can't it's so cute [Music]

Channel: Tasty

Views: 12,478,778

Keywords: K_fe, baking, buzzfeed, buzzfeed tasty, christmas, christmas cookies, cookie, cookie decorating, cookies, cookies art, cookies art decorating, cookies decorating, cookies tasty, cooking, dessert, dough, food, holiday, homemade, how to, how to decorate sugar cookies, icing, recipe, royal icing, sugar cookie, sugar cookies, tasty, tasty 101

Id: EF-9I38ud4s

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 01 2018