Christmas Cookies

'Tis the season for holiday baking! Every year we make plates and plates of sugar cookies to give to friends, neighbors, and families from church so I thought I'd share the recipe. Please note, this recipe is not for the faint of heart. It involves a little more effort than the easy, simple recipes I try to provide on my blog, but since it's only once a year that I have to put in some extra effort, I think it's worth it ☺

Ingredients

2 sticks butter or margarine
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
5 cups flour

Other items needed:

wax paper
rolling pin
cookie cutters
vanilla frosting
sprinkles
food coloring (if you want to go all out for this. I just stuck with normal white frosting because I'm boring)


1. Mix ingredients

Preheat oven to 350. Mix butter, baking powder, vanilla, white sugar, and brown sugar together.

Add the eggs and mix to consistency.

(This is when I gave up and switched to the Kitchenaid. It mixes much better than I do).

Add the flour one cup at a time. If you're using a Kitchenaid like me, I like to slowly pour in each cup while it's mixing.

Knead dough until it's fully mixed.

















2. Spread and cut dough

Roll dough out on wax paper to 1/4" thick (if this means nothing to you, just go for as thin as you can. It's a trial and error process. If you cut the shapes too thin, they'll fall apart as you pull them off, so just play with it). 

I like to separate the dough into little shapes that I flatten to look like "continents". 

Use cookie cutters to make shapes out of the dough. Pull them off and place on a nonstick, ungreased cookie sheet. 
















3. Bake

You can put them pretty close together on the pan. They don't expand much when they bake. Bake for 8 minutes in the oven (if you're putting two pans in the oven, make sure to set the timer for 4 minutes and then switch the pans to bake another 4 minutes, so none of them burn). 

While the first batch is baking, gather the remaining dough into another lump and roll it out again to form a smaller continent. Repeat until the continent gets smaller...

 and smaller...

and smaller... 

Hubby likes to get really precise and make sure the last chunk of dough is some nice shape, but I had just filled the last pan and had a small scrap of dough left, so I just tossed it instead of wasting a whole other batch for 1 cookie (you could eat it... but it tastes so much better with frosting).

When the cookies are done, let them cool for a minute. Then slide them onto a cooling tray or into a container so you can put another batch in.

There will be casualties... if you're really crafty, you can perform surgery by using the frosting as glue, but we normally keep the mistakes to eat ourselves (sorry not sorry).

If you're exhausted at this point, have no fear. You can save the rest for a later point in time. As long as the cookies are baked, there is no rush to do the frosting and sprinkling right away.














4. Frost and Sprinkle

Spread vanilla frosting on the cookies. 

Be generous because the frosting is the best part!

Add sprinkles (if desired). For those of you who really want to get into it, this is when you mix the food coloring with the frosting (red, green, whatever colors you want) to decorate the cookies. That's a little too much work for me, so I just make them all generic.


Enjoy and share with others! ☺