“But the perfection of a sugar cookie isn’t in the artistry, but in the love that’s poured into them and the traditions they hold.” Here, Executive Editor Cara McDonald shares her mom’s recipe.
Mimi’s Best Sugar Cookies
Yield 1–2 dozen
This recipe came from a Hudson’s department store magazine many years ago; they’re a delicate cookie, pale in the center with a brown rim.
- 1 stick unsalted butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla or almond extract
- 1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla or almond extract. Mix together flour, salt and baking powder, then stir into the butter mixture to make a soft dough. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour or up to two days.
When ready to bake cookies, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Turn dough onto floured or powder sugared surface, and roll to desired thickness (these are best rolled thin, 1/4 inch or less). Decorate with colored egg yolk or sprinkles, then bake until golden at edges, approximately 9 minutes (depending on thickness).
Every Christmas without fail, for nearly 60 years, my mom has made Christmas cut-out cookies. Her recipe for sugar cookie dough is delicious and a pain in the neck—more butter, less flour, prone to getting melty and spreading in the oven, sometimes resulting in bloated Santas and deformed Rudolphs with swollen legs.
But when chilled enough and rolled out just right, this tricky recipe yields cookies that are marvelously crisp, buttery and light—no frosting, no thick cakey crumb, just a one-after-the-other kind of treat that’s hard to stop eating.
As kids, we’d sneak into the dining room, where the Christmas cookie tins were stacked, and try to silently pry off their metal lids. They’d always open with a clanging pop that immediately resulted in my mom calling, from some distant corner of the house, “Girls, stay OUT OF THE COOKIES.”
We hated the task of rolling and cutting the dough. We’d be coated in powdered sugar as the dough ball got smaller and stickier, wiping our cheeks with our sleeves while our sticky fingers adjusted the pastry sleeve on the rolling pin.
But we loved the decorating. My mom would set us up at the kitchen table with these cut-out blank canvases and we’d dip paint brushes in a mixture of egg yolk and food coloring to create tiny masterpieces. Nothing too flashy—we only had four colors, so the result was a lot of red and green, with the occasional blue-striped candy cane, for variety’s sake.
I could marvel at our creativity and focus like it was the product of some bygone era, but we’ve seen the cookie painting work its magic on our own children.
Each year, my mother makes batches of dough in advance to freeze. A few days before Christmas, my nieces head over to my parents’ house to roll the cookies out. They tie on cheesy aprons (a long-ago HomeGoods find) and select the shapes—stars, boots, bells, candy canes, gingerbread men and some very tricky poinsettias. They fill and stack tray upon tray like a slippery high-stakes Jenga game, piling them in the cold garage until the younger cousins arrive to paint, sprinkle and bake.
Of course, the little kids are all in. But it makes me smile to watch the teens hunch over their cookie trays, painting with their favorite football team colors or layering wild sprinkle combinations on the same nostalgic shapes I used to paint as a child—the angel with the too-large halo, the slightly bent holly sprig. They laugh, spill, compare, get reprimanded for over-sugaring, and someone always puts the blue painting brushes in the yellow color dish, resulting in too many shades of green.
But the perfection of a sugar cookie isn’t in the artistry, but in the love that’s poured into them and the traditions they hold. With each one that’s pulled from the noisy metal tin, I see the familiar smile of the old angel, the careful design sensibilities of my little niece, the taste of a recipe as familiar as a home.