I Have Mastered the Sugar Cookie

Okay, so I don't talk about it much but cookies have always defeated me. Rolled cookies of pretty much any kind. Drop cookies are fine, it's kind of hard to screw those up but rolled sugar cookies, gingerbread cookies, what have you, have always been a problem. They've always been way too crumbly to roll. Not a bad thing if you're doing shortbread and you're going to be pushing it into a press but not so great for snowflakes, stars and butterflies, or, in this case, shamrocks.

I did them for the Comhaltas fundraiser that's coming up and I used the Rolled Cookie recipe from Wilton with the thought that they try really hard to make this stuff accessible for the general public (not that Betty and Fannie haven't). It was crumbly. It was giving my dough hook a serious run for its money. So rather than try to bull my way through I started to play with the recipe (you know, I've always been a little afraid to do that with baked goods because everyone always talks about the chemistry of baking but damnit, I've got my bones in chemistry and I have the student loan to prove it so I started tweaking the recipe and it was wicked easy). I ended up reducing the flour by a half cup and adding 2 more eggs (technically one egg and 1/4 cup flour because I had doubled the recipe. It made for a really resilient dough that cut like a dream, was easy to transfer with minimal breakage and they taste lovely, not uber-dense. I used too much vanilla (per usual) and some almond extract, I would totally use other flavours for this though. So this is my final version:

1 cup butter
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 t vanilla
1/2 t almond extract
2 1/2 cup flour
2 t baking powder
1 t salt

Preheat 400 (Oh yeah, I reduced this to 375) Cream butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla. Add first cup of flour with salt and baking powder. Add remaining flour a cup at a time. Bake 6-7 minutes.

I started out using my regular pizza pans with the thought that I could cycle them in and out of the oven, I'd have one ready to go by the time the last one was done but the baking time is so fussy with them that I eventually just switched to my baking stone and things went a lot more smoothly. I don't know why I never start with that right away.

I read in an old Wilton magazine about rolling the dough right onto the baking sheet and then just removing what's left after you've used the cutters but I tried it and things really didn't start clicking along until I stopped doing that and just rolled them on the counter. It's easier to separate them from the scrap and your scrap dough doesn't have crumbs stuck into it from the pan. It's also a little finicky to remove tiny bits of dough from between the cookies without moving the cookies, they ended up more damaged than if I had moved them from the counter AND they have a tendency to grow together while they're cooking when you do them this way, it's just too tempting to cut them close to each other. With the stone, it took closer to 10 minutes for the first batch but 7 minutes on the nose for the rest of them.

I used full test royal icing to outline the cookies and thinned royal icing almost as a glaze to fill in. Tasty tasty. I have to get them out of my house.