I have a bad habit of skipping over steps in recipes when I look over them, trying to decide whether or not I should give them a try.
More than once, I’ve started baking something, only to realize halfway through that I have to stop and chill an ingredient for an hour or overnight before moving on to the next step.
You’d think after doing this on multiple occasions that I’d be more careful, but I never seem to learn my lesson.
That’s one of the reasons the recipe I’m sharing with you this week was so attractive to me. In all capital letters, right in the recipe, the author noted, “Do not chill the dough.”
Excellent.
That meant I could quickly mix up these cookies, pop them in the oven and be enjoying fresh sugar cookies in no time.
I found this recipe on the blog “In Katrina’s Kitchen.” You can find it at http://www.inkatrinaskitchen.com/best-sugar-cookie-recipe-ever/. I doubled the vanilla in my version.
Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
- 1 egg
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
- Cream the butter and sugar together for several minutes until it’s smooth and creamy.
- Beat in the vanilla, almond and egg.
- Mix in the rest of the ingredients.
- Pull out about a softball-sized portion of dough and roll it out to about one-quarter inch in thickness. Use a cookie cutter to cut out your desired shape and transfer them to a baking sheet—about one-inch apart.
- Continue cutting out shapes with the rest of the dough.
- Bake each batch of cookies for about 8 minutes or until the cookies look like they’re just set around the edges. Let them cool completely before icing and store in an air-tight container.
If you don’t have almond extract, you could toss in even more vanilla if you wanted, but I highly recommend including it. It adds just a little something extra to the flavor of these cookies, which is nice since sugar cookies can easily end up in the bland category.
These also held their shape really nicely. I just used my biscuit cutter to make boring round cookies, but if you have some fun shapes, this is a good recipe to try them out on.
And it’s good because there are no hidden steps or long processes to go through. You just mix them up and start baking, which is my kind of recipe.
This piece first appeared in print on March 15, 2018.
Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.