TWD--Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies And Final Chance for Chocolate!

Before I forget, head on over to Baking Delights and enter to win Marye's last giveaway basket of Hershey's Chocolate goodies!  Wait, don't go yet, read this first, then go!

Tuesday's With Dorie for this week was a wonderful sugar cookie that was fun to make and yummy!  Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies, on page 146-147 of Dorie's wonderful book, Baking From My Home To Yours.  It was chosen by Ulrike of Kuchenlatein.  You can see her cookies on the link and get the recipe for these simple to make and too-easy to eat cookies!

Who doesn't love an iced, decorated sugar cookie?  These were great.   Dorie suggested "playing around" with flavor in these, possibly adding some lemon or orange zest or even cinnamon.   I, like Dorie's grandmother, do not toy with a good sugar cookie.  I had a roommate years ago who always put lemon extract in her sugar cookies, it was always just a tad, but to me made them taste funny.  I just like them sugar flavored! ; )  My roommate, Mary, and I always "fought" about whose cookies were better.  Hard to say, all of our friends would gobble them all up without a problem.  But I still say--mine were better!  I always need to let you know what while this recipe from Dorie's grandmother is just fine and tasty, I still like my tried and true sugar cookie recipe better.  I'm not sure where my mom got her recipe, but we've both been using it for years and it is great.  I will post it another day.  This post is about Dorie's recipe. 

It really was simple to make and I had no troubles rolling out the dough and cutting cute little cookies with it.  Sometimes others complain that the dough just won't cooperate when they  make sugar cookies, but that was not an issue here.  Dorie insists that you chill the dough for two hours before rolling.  I suggest then letting the dough sit at room temperature for about 10 minutes before rolling it.  I thought it was a bit tough to roll.  And for kicks, I also made a log out of some of the dough and tried the good old fashioned way of just cutting the log into circles.  I made a few that way, but seriously--it's just not as fun as rolling out the dough and cutting it with cookie cutters--even if you're just going to cut circles.  You also don't get nice and perfectly round circles. 

I made these cookies for the ornament exchange party I talked about in my last post and I wanted to make a lot, so I used some cute new tiny cookie cutters I recently bought--there's cute little white gingerbread men that look like snowmen, holly leaves, Christmas trees,  and angels--that look like doves.  There is also a candy cane cutter, which I used for the Strawberry Fudge and a bell shaped cutter that I thought didn't really look like bells, so I didn't use that one.  Anyway, I'm rambling. 

  

My favorites have to be the cute little snow guys.  They were all fun to make, but did take me about two hours just to frost and decorate them.  The holly leaves look a little bumpy because I was trying to make the leaf vein marks in them, but the icing spread out enough that you cannot tell.   All the cookies you see in the photos are not all the cookies.

A few people at the ornament party asked me about the icing.  I like it because it dried smooth and hardened so the cookies can be stacked well.

Here is the icing recipe as I made it this time.  (I often don't measure things for this and just add a little of this and a little of that to the main ingredient--powdered sugar.

Sugar Cookie Icing

2 cups powdered sugar

2 tablespoons butter

3-4 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon corn syrup

1/4-1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch salt

food coloring

Combine all together in electric mixer except milk.  When it is all incorporated, add the milk a tablespoon at a time until desired consistency.  The icing is not quite such that you could just dip the cookies, I like to spread it on, but if you want to dip it, add enough liquid until you are able to do so.

I first frost all the cookies that I wanted to be white, then separated some of the icing and made red (I really only did a few of the round cookies in red) and with the rest made green.  Then I had a ball with the sprinkles and decorating.   

I had a lot of fun with this week's TWD!  Thanks Ulrike!