The Best Sugar Cookies to Decorate with Royal Icing (No Spread!!)

hey guys welcome back so i get asked a lot what cookie recipe do i use and how do i actually make them and bake them so today i'll share with you the recipe that i use which is actually from lila loa and it's her vanilla 2.0 recipe which is linked down below in the description of the video and i'll show you my few tweaks that i've learned over the years to make my recipe more suitable to myself and have great reviews from my customers and my friends and family that eat my cookies on a regular basis so let's get started okay so what we'll need today is measuring cups specifically one cup and a half cup and then you're going to need your spatula and a teaspoon so then we're going to have our paddle attachment with our mixer if you don't have a kitchenaid stand with a paddle attachment you can use your regular mixer and then switch over to the dough hook when we get to the dough part so we're going to start with our butter which is at room temperature well mine is almost at room temperature so i've chopped it up a bit and then i have my brown sugar as well as my white sugar we're going to dump it all into the bowl to start with all together now i just want to talk about brown sugar in the recipe this is why i really like this recipe because it includes brown sugar i feel like there's so much more flavor that comes from it versus just all white sugar or even some recipes that call for powdered sugar it's all personal preference so it doesn't really matter but like i said i like the way that the brown sugar it sort of caramelizes in the oven and it gives it some great flavor so here we are we're just seeing everything being dumped into the bowl and then we're gonna proceed to put it into the mixer so i have a kitchenaid mixer here with the paddle attachment if you don't have one no worries just use your regular mixer but like i said further down you will have to change it to a dough hook if you have one because the dough does get pretty stiff this one can handle it but usually the smaller mixers they have a little bit more trouble when the dough gets a little too tough so i'm just going to start at low speed here just to incorporate my butter and sugar so we don't have things flying out everywhere and i'm going to crank up this bead a few notches just to get it going and to whip up that butter and sugar together we just want to make it more creamy and cohesive so we'll let that run for a couple minutes until you see that the texture has changed you can see it's still looking crumbly now but in a little bit um it'll come together and just remember every once in a while scrape down your bowl i find especially with these mixtures the bowl is pretty deep and so you want to just make sure that you're getting everything out of the bottom of there so again i'll just turn my speed back up it's on sort of just under medium nice and medium low and then once you start to see the the batter coming together there it's kind of creaming together the color lightens just a little bit then you know you're ready for the next step so i've got my eggs here and i'm just going to add some vanilla to my eggs if you do have real vanilla it helps the flavor comes through a lot better if you don't know worries imitation vanilla works just as well and so there's one more thing that i like to add to this recipe that isn't called for in the original and it's to add butter flavor from lauren's it's an emulsion and so it's quite strong and it doesn't lose the flavor in the oven like some other let's say extract so it really brings out the butterness and the buttery flavor of the cookies and it really complements well with the brown sugar so this is a little extra step if you have this or you can find it usually at michael's or a local you know cake or craft stores and if you can add it i assure you it tastes great so i'm just gonna add the eggs the vanilla and the butter emulsion all together i usually try to add one egg mix it in a little bit and then add the second one and again we're gonna sort of cream the butter the sugar and the eggs all together now and every once in a while just check your bowl make sure you scrape down the side so that everything is getting mixed in nice and and good you can see here my batter has lightened us slightly in color and so everything's nicely mixed in it's looking good so we can move on to the next step just going to scrape my bowl down one more time just to make sure everything's in there there's no sugar stuck in the bottom and we're ready to go so i've measured out my flour and i just gonna add some salt and some baking powder to it now i just want to talk about the baking powder usually people like to leave it out completely or just put a tiny bit the recipe only calls for about a quarter teaspoon i believe i actually like to put a full teaspoon in there people worry about spread if they add baking powder but the thing is baking powder makes your cookies sort of taller instead of wider so i do like to put a little bit more just to make them not so dense and i find that i don't really get much spread my cookies hold their shape really well so i'm just going to give this a quick stir and now we're ready to add it to our our butter sugar egg mixture so again if you don't have one of these heavy duty mixers you might need to change over to a dough hook once we add a little bit more of the flour so just be aware of that so i'm going to slowly add the flour a bit at a time to make sure that it all kind of gets incorporated and you want to sort of mix every so often let it go for a few seconds 10 to 15 seconds just so the dough can rehydrate itself and there's not flour flying out of your bowl everywhere okay so every once in a while you do want to scrape the sides of your bowl and get right to the bottom of your bowl to make sure that everything is getting evenly incorporated now again the recipe talks about the amount of flour to use and it depends on your altitude and you know how humid your area is and this and that i found i find i start with about four cups of flour myself and the reason being i've tried with a little bit of less flour a little bit of more flour and i found this works best for me i don't necessarily like too soft of a dough what i find is when i roll them out and i transfer them to the cookie sheet if i pick them up and they're way too soft my finger fingers leave imprints in the cookies or it gets stretched out and i really found no flavor difference when i added a little bit less flour to a little bit more and sometimes i even find i need more than four cups so i always do the four cups and i'll keep mixing it and if my dough is still a little bit sticky or too soft and i can push my finger into the dough then i know that i need a little bit more so there's not an exact measurement keep going until you find what works best for you but this is what i like to do and what i find that helps keep the shape of the cookies the best flour is a super important part in your cookie recipe especially if you don't want spread if you leave out too much flour you will get quite a bit of spread so it's all with the ratios to do with the sugar and the eggs so it's very important if you're getting a lot of spread it could be that you're not adding enough flour to your dough so here i'm just going to grab a little bit more flour you can see the dough is pulling away from the sides of the of the bowl and that means it's almost ready but when i touch it with my hands i feel that it's a little bit too soft for me still and so i'm going to add some flour now again you know if you want to roll out your dough right away then i would suggest you probably need a little bit more flour than you if let's say you let your dough you roll it out and then you stick it in the fridge for a bit or you let it sit on the counter for a half an hour hour and get back to it and rolling because the longer the dough sits the more it kind of firms up and again i'll show you later on why i like a sort of firm dough to work with so once i'm happy i usually squish it between my hands and like i said if it squishes really easily and it feels super soft i know there's not enough flour for myself and another thing is too if your butter was really warm your dough may need a little bit more flour because your dough will be softer [Music] okay so here i can see my dough looks pretty good it's got quite a bit of flour in it and i'm just playing with my hands to see you can see the dough looks crumbly but when i play with it it comes together and i can tell that the texture isn't as soft as it was before so this looks like it's ready to go so i'm gonna grab my cookie sheets um i use dark pans a lot of people use lighter pans they don't like their cookies browning again i really like the browning or the golden brown edges and bottoms because it gets that flavor from brown sugar and then you just need your cookie cutters whether you have metal ones or 3d plastic ones it doesn't matter you can use whatever you have on hand and then also i use parchment paper to roll my cookies my cookie dough in between so i have two long pieces of parchment paper and the reason being is if your parchment paper is moving around too much on the counter if it's a long piece i can kind of hang a little bit over the edge and use my body to kind of secure it against the counter when i'm rolling it out so now i like to sort of combine like just play with my dough a little bit just to make sure everything's combined you can see a few pieces are coming out so i just like to pick those all up in my dough and then i place it between the two pieces of parchment paper and then when i put the top piece on i will squish it down first with my hands just to sort of flatten out the dough a little bit and then i'll start to roll it just makes it easier to roll out like that the beginning gets a little bit tough the dough is like i said it's a stronger sort of dough because of all the flour that we put in there so i just roll it out and i don't have guides a lot of people use they have rolling pins with guides on them so you can roll them exactly even all across the dough so all your cookies are the same height other people use you know those paint sticks that you get from like hardware stores that you mix the paint with you can put a couple of those sticks together and put them on the side of your dough and use your use those as guides so that you don't go any thinner or thicker than that i usually just do it by eye by hand i run my hand over the dough and see if there's any places that are thicker and thinner and i try my best they are handmade cookies so i feel like a little bit of difference here and there makes them you know not machine cut basically and over you know when you have done it so many times it kind of comes natural to see how thick and thin your cookies are so you can see my dough is nicely evenly shaped now so i'm going to go ahead and cut i produce metal cutters i almost prefer them a little bit because they have such a nice sharp clean edge and so i push down evenly and i sort of wiggle them a little bit just to loosen the dough the same thing with 3d cutters it depends which ones you get you know some are better than others but again i do the same thing i push it down and wiggle it a little bit in the dough just to loosen the sides of the shape now again because my dough is on the thicker side the sort of more firm side i don't have too many issues with my cutter sticking to my dough that's one of the advantages of adding enough flour to your dough but if you do find that your cutters are sticking to your dough and you're not getting clean shapes you can always dip them in a little bit of flour or cornstarch and you can use that to push them through and they shouldn't be sticking to your cutters so what i like to do is i like to take the dough that i rolled out and any excess and i like to put in a bowl on the side i don't want to roll my dough too many times so then i'll put everything to the side and then i'll come back to it once i've rolled all my original dough i usually take the pieces around the cutouts out and then what i'll do is i'll put my hand underneath the parchment paper and i'll sort of lift up the piece of the dough the the cookie that i have there and i'll try to flip it either onto my hand or i'll try to pick it up with my hand if my dough is firm enough this one sat around for a little bit while we're filming so it's quite firm so i was able just to pick them up and place them on the sheet like that this way i'm not damaging the shape i'm not getting my fingerprints in them by trying to pick up the edge so they stay nice and crisp and clean as you can see okay so now when i have all my cutouts on the cookie sheet now the recipe doesn't necessarily call for this but i do like to do it just as an extra precautionary measure to have no more spread is to put them in the fridge for a little bit just for 10 to 15 minutes however long it takes me to roll a couple times and fill my next cookie sheet what popping them in the fridge does is it just makes the butter in the cookie dough a little bit more solid and so it takes a little bit less time for that butter to melt in or sorry more time to melt in the oven and less time for spread so when my next cookie sheet is ready i'll pop that one in and take the first one out and pop it straight into the oven so once in a while when you bake your cookies you'll have like a bubble that forms on your dough or some an even surface sometimes so what you can do i have a fondant smoother here or you can use the back of a spatula or like one of those flipper spatulas and just press down on your cookies if you have any of those bubbles these ones were the first my first roll out so they're pretty smooth usually happens towards the end of your dough if you've rolled it a couple times but that's a little trick that you can get to flatten your cookies i usually wait until i see the edges are sort of golden brown i know a lot of people like to see their cookies nice and white and not like any color on the bottom of them but to be honest um i've tried that and i don't like the flavor it just does not taste baked to me and it doesn't have very much flavor so like i said these ones have brown sugar they have some color to them and when you bake them that brown sugar sort of caramelizes in the oven and so when you let it get that sort of golden color i find it takes it to the next level and it's a really important step that i find people may not know okay guys so that is exactly how i make my cookies and roll them out you can see there's a few additions there to the recipe that i have linked below my little twists on it but they came out perfect the shapes are great they're ready to go and decorated and they taste great so if you guys like this recipe let me know below if you've tried it or if you have your own little tweaks i'd love to hear it and thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys in the next video [Music] [Music]

Channel: Little Cookie Co

Views: 403,208

Rating: 4.9340696 out of 5

Keywords: royal icing, decorated cookies, sugar cookies, decorated sugar cookies, recipe, cookie recipe, little cookie

Id: 3orMJXkKk5o

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020