Holiday Baking!

Frosted sugar cookies are delicious any time of the year, but are particularly fun for Christmas. Our family always bakes them, and we follow (generally) a recipe from Nigella Lawson’s cookbook, Feast. This weekend I made our first batch.

The ingredients are as follows:

12 tablespoons soft, unsalted butter

1 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 scant teaspoon salt

The first step is to take the butter out of the fridge and let it soften! Don’t melt it in the microwave. It just won’t work. Once it’s soft, cream it with the sugar, and then add the egg and the vanilla. In a separate bowl mix the flour, baking powder, and salt with a fork. Add the flour mixture to the butter/sugar/egg mix gently and make sure you stop and clean the sides of the bowl so everything is combined, especially if you are using a mixer.

Form the batter into two balls and then press each flat into a cylinder and wrap in saran wrap to chill in the oven for an hour or more.

Once the dough is chilled, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees and then roll the dough out on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch thickness. Cut out your cookie shapes and place them on buttered cookie sheets. Chill the cut-out cookies for 15 minutes while the oven heats, and if you have scraps, form them into the ball and let them chill until ready to cook.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until slightly brown around the edges–the thinner and more pointy shapes will brown faster so keep an eye on those or put them in the middle of the baking sheet. The photo below shows what they should look like.

Let all your lovely cookies cool completely before frosting. (You can see that a few of mine got a bit too brown…just add more frosting!)

For frosting, you can make it from scratch but we like the store brought vanilla frosting. Add whatever color you want and add whatever topping you want. (Gel coloring is always better because it doesn’t add too much liquid to the frosting and makes a more intense color.)

Happy Holidays!

-KidsCookDinner:)