Hey, everyone Sam here from Sugar Spun Run and today I'll be showing you how to make the perfect cutout sugar cookies.
Everybody needs a good cut out sugar cookie, whether it's for the holidays or any time of year.
This is my go-to cookie recipe it comes out perfectly every time. It keeps nice,
sharp edges when it bakes in the oven. I think you guys are going to love this one.
So let's begin.
The first thing that you're going to need is one
cup or two sticks of unsalted butter and you want this to be softened to room temperature.
We'll add this to a large bowl, and we're also going to add a cup of granulated sugar, and
we'll use an electric mixer to beat the butter and sugar together until they're nicely combined.
So once you've beaten your butter and sugar until it's nice and creamy,
we're going to add one large egg, and a teaspoon and a half of pure vanilla
extract and we'll give everything a good mix until it's well combined.
We'll set this first bowl aside and we'll need a separate bowl with two and a half cups of all-purpose flour.
Add 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder and
3/4 teaspoon of salt and just stir those together until they're combined. Now that we have our flour mixture prepped,
we're going to bring back our butter mixture and we're going to gradually add the flour to the butter mixture.
I like to add this in about 3 or 4 parts; stirring well in between each addition until the dough is nicely combined.
Now if you want to make these sugar cookies into chocolate sugar cookies, you can absolutely do that,
however, instead of using the two and a half cups of all-purpose flour,
you would only use two cups plus 2 tablespoons of flour,
and then you would add 1/2 cup of
natural unsweetened cocoa powder in with the flour mixture, and that would give you chocolate sugar cookies instead.
Now our sugar cookie dough is finished however, it is a little too sticky for us to actually roll it out at this point.
So we are going to need to chill it to do this. I recommend dividing the dough
approximately in half and placing your dough on a piece of cling wrap.
So as I mentioned the dough is pretty sticky at this point.
So you're not going to want to use your hands directly on it too much.
So I just kind of drop about half of it onto the cling wrap and then I use the cling wrap to form it into
a disc, and you'll do this with both halves of your dough.
So now this dough will need to be chilled until it is firm enough to roll out and hold its shape when you've used cookie
cutters on it. For me, this usually takes at least two to three hours.
Once your dough has finished chilling, you're going to want to pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then you'll take your cookie dough, you'll unwrap it and we're going to place this on a generously floured surface.
Lightly flour your cookie dough.
You just want to dust the surface with flour and add as much flour as you need to it while you're rolling.
You can add more flour underneath, you can dust more on top if you need to, to keep the dough from becoming too sticky.
You're going to use a rolling pin to roll this out to about 1/4 inch thickness.
Now rolling your dough out to 1/4 inch will yield thicker softer cookies. If you want thinner and crispier cookies,
you can roll them out thinner to about 1/8 an inch.
And I did include instructions in my printable recipe on different ways you can cook these if you want thinner, or thicker cookies.
Once you've rolled out your cookie dough, now you're going to use your cookie cutters to cut out shapes and transfer them to either a
parchment paper lined cookie sheet or a regular ungreased cookie sheet. I just prefer to use parchment paper.
It makes cleanup a lot easier.
Now keep in mind, when you are making these cookies, and when you're choosing your cookie cutters, you can use whatever size you want,
but you want to try to keep the sizes similar. So here I have two similar sized cookie cutters.
They're about three inches apiece.
I wouldn't want to use a really large or a really small one on the same batch on the same baking sheet because they're not
going to cook evenly.
Now these sugar cookies won't spread very much in the oven, but you'll still want to space them at least an inch apart on the baking sheet.
Try to do a little bit better than I'm doing here and keep your cuts as close together as possible.
You're going to want to get as many cut outs out of this first roll of dough as you can. So keep your cuts nice and close.
Once you've cut out as many cookies as you can out of this first roll of your dough, you're going to regroup the scraps. If
it's sticky you can add more flour. That's fine.
And then we'll roll it out again so we get as many cookies as possible out of our dough.
Now at this point if you want to add any colored sugar, like red or green sprinkles to the top of your cookies, you would
add them now before you bake them.
I'm going to be covering these with a frosting, a sugar cookie icing, so I'm not going to be adding sprinkles.
We are going to bake these in our 350 degrees Fahrenheit preheated oven for about 10 minutes.
Keep in mind that the time will vary a little bit if your cookies are smaller. They'll need less time. If they're larger
they're going to obviously need more time. So just keep that in mind.
What we're looking for is cookies that are just beginning to turn lightly golden brown around the edges.
Once your cookies have finished baking, we're going to set these aside and let them cool, and meanwhile
we'll prepare our sugar cookie frosting.
So to make our sugar cookie frosting you're going to start with three cups of powdered sugar, and I recommend
sifting this especially if you're going to be piping, because little sugar clumps can clog up your piping tips if you don't sift it first.
So three cups of sugar, and
you'll need three to four tablespoons of milk. We're going to start with just three tablespoons.
And then if our mixture is still a little too thick, we'll add that extra tablespoon later on.
Next you'll need two tablespoons of light corn syrup.
And please keep in mind that this is not the same thing as high fructose corn syrup. We'll add this to our frosting, and
we'll also add a half teaspoon of vanilla extract for flavor.
Now, my sugar cookie frosting recipe is a little different from most that you might be familiar with. A lot of sugar cookies use royal icing instead.
.I'm not a fan of the taste of royal icing so I much prefer this one.
I really like how easy it is to work with. How easy it is to make, so I
highly recommend that you give this one a shot. We'll go ahead and mix all of these ingredients together until they're smooth.
It's gonna take a minute for the sugar to come together and for the mixture to be smooth, but it will come together.
Just keep working it with your spoon, and then once everything is combined you can decide if you need to add more milk or not.
Another great thing about this frosting is it's really hard to screw up. If you make it too thick, you add more milk to thin
it out. If it's too thin you add more powdered sugar to thicken it up. I think you can see that
this one is a little bit too thick.
So we are going to add more milk. Just a splash at a time, and continue to stir until
we get the consistency were looking for.
So this consistency looks pretty good.
One way that I test that I have the consistency I'm looking for is if I pull the spoon out of the frosting,
the ribbon that falls back down holds its shape for a couple seconds before fading back into the rest of the frosting.
That's usually how I can tell that it's done.
So what I'm going to do now, is I want to color some of this frosting and you can divide this into as many bowls
as you want, and make as many colors as you want. I'm just doing stars and Christmas trees today.
So I'm just going to need white and green frosting. So I'm just gonna portion some of this into a separate bowl,
and I want green frosting so I'm going to be adding some green food coloring. I really like gel food colorings.
This is americolor leaf green and I'll just add a drop to that.
And now I'm just going to put the frosting into a piping bag.
I've fitted my piping bags with Wilton 4 and Wilton 5 D piping tips, and just putting the piping bag into a glass is the
Easiest way for me to get the icing in there without making a huge mess.
Now you do not want to pipe any frosting on your cookies until they've cooled. While I've been making the frosting mine have cooled.
So I can go ahead and show you how I decorate my sugar cookies.
So I like to outline the cookie and then fill in most of the cookie with frosting, and then I'll just take a toothpick and
use that to kind of flood the rest of the frosting so it bleeds together. It'll dry nice and smooth.
This frosting starts to dry pretty quickly. It takes a few hours for it to dry completely, but the surface will dry pretty fast.
So if you want to add any sprinkles, add them immediately after piping your frosting.
As I mentioned the frosting will take several hours at least to dry completely.
I usually like to make my cookies the night before an event and let the frosting dry overnight and by the next morning
it's completely dry all the way through. They're great for stacking. The frosting's not going to run off and anything else.
That is all there is to making your own easy cut out sugar cookies.
I really hope you guys try out this recipe. It has received so many great reviews already.
So I really think you're going to love it. Thank you so much for watching and I can't wait to see you next time.