Sugar Cookie Recipes
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Welcome to Sugar Cookie Recipe Central
Here you will find many different sugar cookie recipes, including my maternal grandmother's lemon "Seventeen's". Sugar cookies come in many shapes and sizes and can be soft or crispy. For a lot of us they bring up memories of grandma's house. This is collection of different recipes, tools and even a mystery to help you bake your perfect sugar cookie.
Quick Find: Cut Out Cookies, Drop Cookies, Molded Cookies, Decorating Cookies, Cookie Presses, Molds and Stamps, Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie Mix Recipes, Martha Stewart Sugar Cookies, Food Network Sugar Cookie Collection, Soft Lofthouse-Type Cookies
Image by Vanessa Myers (simplefoodrecipes) on Flickr using a Creative Commons Commercial-Use License.
"Seventeen's" Cut-Out Sugar Cookie Recipe
My Grandma's Lemon Sugar Cookie Recipe
They are thin and crispy with a light lemon flavor. They are not overly sweet. They keep very well and I actually like them better a little stale because the lemon flavor comes up more the older they get.
The recipe makes several dozen cookies.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups shortening*
2 1/4 cups sugar
3 eggs, well beaten
5 1/4 cups all purpose flour, sifted
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons grated lemon rind
*(can be all shortening or a mixture of shortening and butter - I usually use 3/4 cups butter and 3/4 cups Crisco shortening)
Cream shortening. Add sugar gradually and cream together until light and fluffy. Stir in well-beaten eggs and beat until thick. Add lemon rind.
Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. See note below. Add dry ingredients to the shortening, sugar, egg and lemon mixture one cup at a time.
Divide into 3 or 4 parts, wrap in waxed paper or plastic wrap and chill thoroughly (several hours or overnight).
Now you're ready to bake the cookies. Heat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
Roll out dough to 1/4 inch thick on a floured surface and cut out with cookie cutters. If you're baking in a warm climate you will want to keep each piece of dough in the refrigerator until you're ready to work with it. Otherwise I like to let it sit at room temperature for 5 or 10 minutes before I start rolling it out.
Place on ungreased baking sheets with a 1/2 inch margin between cookies to allow for any spreading. (If you don't want them to spread, chill entire sheet before baking.)
Add colored sugars, sprinkles, and any other decorations before baking.
Bake until just barely brown around the edges, which is 8 to 15 minutes depending on your oven and baking sheet.
Let cool and then frost undecorated cookies, if desired. (These are good just plain, too.)
Note: Since I've started using a Kitchen-Aid mixer to make these cookies I don't sift together the dry ingredients first. Instead, I mix in the salt and baking powder to the creamed mixture first, then add the flour. Also, depending on the weather and humidity, you may need slightly less flour. You want to end up with dough the consistency of Play-Dough. The sifting of dry ingredients is just to help distribute the salt and baking powder more evenly when you're mixing by hand.
Aunt Rikka's Sugar Cookies
From another generation back
Cut-Out Sugar Cookie Recipes
- Best Ever Sugar Cookie Recipe?
- Article with "grandma's" sugar cookie recipe in it.
- Simply Recipes: Sugar Cookies Recipe
- Two different recipes on one page.
- No Fail Sugar Cookie Recipe « Fancy Flours: Where Bakers Bloom
- These hold their shape. Wonder where they got the snowflake cutter?
- Brown Sugar Shortbread
- Cut-out shortbread recipe with a brown sugar twist.
- "Mom's" Nutmeg Sugar Cookies
- Basic roll-out sugar cookie with nutmeg to flavor them.
- 'Mom's' Old Fashion "Puffy" Sugar Cookies
- "Mix all ingredients together like pie dough."
- Norwegian Sugar Cookies
- Must be the cream of tartar that makes them Norwegian.
- Old Fashioned Sugar Cookies
- These have orange extract as a flavoring.
- Martha Stewart's Basic Sugar Cookies
- Basic cut out sugar cookies.
- Sugar Cookies Recipe: Recipes: Food Network
- Enjoy this Sugar Cookies recipe from Good Eats
To Roll or Not to Roll Sugar Cookie Recipe
From Gold Medal Flour
Awesome Cookie Decorating Book
Cookie Craft: From Baking to Luster Dust, Designs and Techniques for Creative Cookie Occasions
Amazon Price: $10.75 (as of 02/13/2012)
A beautiful book about how to decorate sugar cookies for many different occasions.
All About Decorating Cookies
Cookie Craft Christmas
Dozens of Decorating Ideas for a Sweet Holiday
Cookie Craft Christmas: Dozens of Decorating Ideas for a Sweet Holiday
Amazon Price: $3.90 (as of 02/13/2012)
Each spread features a full-page, close-up photograph of one cookie cutter shape with detailed decorating instructions on the facing page. Some pages feature one gloriously decorated cookie, while others might feature two or three interpretations of the same shape - ornaments in complementary colors, Christmas trees decorated in varying styles, or gingerbread men wearing a rainbow of colors and patterns.
Publisher's Note:
The chart on page 17 gives ingredient quantities for making royal icing with meringue powder. Please note that you should use only 4 teaspoons of meringue powder for 2 cups of confectioners' sugar in both the piping and the flooding recipes. (The table incorrectly gives the meringue powder quantity as 4 tablespoons.) This will be corrected in reprints of the book.
Sugarplums Recipe
From my grandma, the Sugarplum Fairy
When my grandma Effie was making Seventeens at Christmas she would take the leftover butter and confectioner's sugar from the icing and make me some "sugarplums" (I was the only grandchild). They were very yummy and very magical to me. She would only make a few so I had to make them last through the holiday vacation.
Here is an approximation of the recipe:
- 1 stick of unsalted butter, slightly softened
- 5 cups of confectioners (powdered) sugar (more or less)
- 1/4 cup of cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla or almond or rum or peppermint or other flavoring
- Sprinkles and/or non-pariels*
First beat the butter until creamy. (The colder you can keep the butter the better.) Then add flavoring, if desired. Then add enough confectioner's sugar to make a very stiff, dry frosting. Then add enough cream to make it smooth but still solid enough to mold into balls. Roll into small balls and roll in sprinkles, etc. to coat. Store in the refrigerator.
*Check out these peppermint flavored sprinkles.
Image courtesy of Overduebook on Flickr.
How to Make Sugar Cookies a Work of Art
Drop Sugar Cookie Recipes From Scratch
- Cooks.com - Recipe - Anne's Drop Sugar Cookies
- Interesting recipe that uses buttermilk.
- Astray Recipes: Lemon drop sugar cookies
- Easy lemon drop sugar cookies.
- Cooks Recipes | Drop Sugar Cookies Recipe
- Almond and vanilla flavoring in these.
- Cooks.com - Recipe - Soft Sugar Cookies
- Uses shortening and baking soda.
- Cooks.com - Soft Buttery Sugar Cookies
- Uses one cup of butter and baking powder.
My Indispensible Kitchen Tool
It's worth every penny
KitchenAid KP26M1XNP Professional 600 Series 6-Quart Stand Mixer, Nickel Pearl
Amazon Price: $355.00 (as of 02/13/2012)
For a long time I was a purist when it came to making cookies. If you didn't make them by hand, they weren't real cookies. Then I got older and I didn't have as much time. I'd watch Martha Stewart turn on her KitchenAid and watch everything be whipped up in no time. At last I got one of my own and it changed my life!
What a time saver it is! It is completely amazing. Sugar cookies that used to take 30 minutes to mix up now take 10. When I first got it I was thrown off by having all that extra time. And the thoroughness with which things are mixed is something to behold as well.
Not just for cookies, I use it for making bread, pastry, and even meatloaf and mashed potatoes.
Seems like a lot of money, I know, but if you factor in how much you are worth an hour in wages it will pay for itself in no time.
Molded Sugar Cookie Recipes
- Sugar Cookies With Options
- With different ways to decorate and embellish.
- Cookie Recipes
- Recipes for both plain vanilla and chocolate cookies that can be molded by hand or with using a cookie mold.
- Amish Sugar Cookies
- Refrigerate overnight before molding into balls.
- Raised Sugar Cookies
- Yeast is an unusual ingredient in these cookies.
- Mayonnaise Sugar Cookie Recipe
- I like the idea of using mayonnaise as the shortening or oil.
- No Roll Sugar Cookies
- "Easy to make and no fuss with rolling them out, plus they have that delightful melt-in-your-mouth texture." Butter, shortening, granulated sugar, powdered sugar, and cream of tartar.
- Powdered Sugar Recipe
- Butter flavored shortening, powdered sugar, and cream of tartar.
Cookie Presses, Molds and Stamps
Great Tools for Making Sugar Cookies
Wilton Cookie Master Plus Cookie Press
This cordless electric cookie press will have you more...2 points
S/S SCOOP & RELEASE COOKIE DRPR
"Make neat, uniform cookies the easy way! With more...1 point
Snowflake Cookie Cutter Set - 8 pcs
Make holiday or everyday cookies extra special whe more...0 points
Kaiser Patisserie 9-Piece Christmas Cookie Cutter Set with Storage Ring
Nine charming Christmas shapes will help you start more...0 points
AirBake by WearEver Natural 3 piece baking sheet combo Small, Medium, Large
Bake a bevy of cookies, evenly with no risk of bur more...0 points
Crown Cookie Cutter
Make holiday or everyday cookies extra special when more...0 points
Autumn Leaf Cookie Cutters Color Set of 7
Make holiday or everyday cookies extra special when more...0 points
Savory Sugar Cookies
Sweet, salty, herby - Savory!
Try adding some basil to the "Seventeen's" lemon cookies above and serving them with homemade cream of tomato soup. Or go one step further and basil and pine nuts for pesto sugar cookies. Or how about a sweet curry cardamom cookie? Maybe Tabasco sauce cookies (think pepper jelly). The possibilities are endless. (Perhaps I've been watching too much Top Chef! I wish I had time to try these ideas out.)
- Ginger-Lemon-Sage Cookies
- The lemon sage combination is showing up in all sorts of desserts these days.
- Sweet Sage (or other herb) Cookies
- Herbs and cornmeal are tasty additions to these sugar cookies.
- Lavender-Lemon Sugar Cookies
- Lavender is another herb that is enjoying a renaissance as an edible. I've seen lavender shortbread for sale in more than one coffee shop.
- Garlic Sugar Cookies
- This isn't a recipe, but I put the link here for inspiration because I couldn't find a garlic cookie recipe. My favorite garlic bread is when the bread is slightly sweet so I thought, why not garlic sugar cookies?
- Ethel's Nice Tomato Cookies
- Okay, I know that tomatoes are really a fruit, and these cookies are probably completely sweet, but I included it here because it's pretty wild to think of sugar cookie sandwiches with a sweet tomato filling.
- Savory Toasted Walnut Rosemary Salt Cookies
- There is no sugar in these at all, but they look like sugar cookies.
Holiday Specific Sugar Cookie Recipes
- Maya's Day of the Dead Cookies
- The cutest skulls you'll ever eat in vanilla and chocolate cookie dough.
- Decorating Pumpkin and Turkey Cookies from Martha Stewart
- The pumpkin cookies use melted orange hard candy as "icing".
- Snowflake Cookies
- Too pretty to eat! Vanilla and chocolate sugar cookies.
- Valentine Heart Sugar Cookies
- How to decorate some beautifully ornate heart shaped cookies for Valentine's Day.
- Celtic Cookie Stamps and Jello Sugar Cookie Recipe
- A selection of celtic design cookie stamps.
Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie Mix
These are amazingly good
Creme Brulee Cheesecake Bars
Nanaimo Bars
Almond Streusel Cherry Cheesecake Bars
Elegant Almond Bars
White Chocolate Macaroon Cookies
Sunny Lemon Bars
Apricot Butter Bars with Cardamom-Butter Glaze
Caramel Peanut Butter Bars
Orange-Glazed Rosemary-Cranberry Cutouts
Buckeye Delights
Chai Spiced Almond Celebration Cookies
And this is just the beginning. Check the Betty Crocker Website for many more.
Betty Crocker Cookie Mix, Sugar, 17.5-Ounce Pouches (Pack of 12)
Amazon Price: $25.85 (as of 02/13/2012)
Amazingly good cookies that can either be dropped or cut out. Five minutes to mix up.
Martha Stewart Sugar Cookie Recipes
- Perfect Sugar Cookies and Royal Icing
- A video from Martha Stewart Living.
- Decorated Santa Cookies
- Video with step by step instructions to make professional looking santa cookies.
- Allergen Free Rolled Maple Sugar Cookies
- Video from Martha Stewart Living.
- Angelettis
- Anise and lemon juice flavor these small cookies.
- Black Cat Paw Cookies
- Imagine Andy Dick and Martha Stewart doing a Halloween show making black sugar cookies in costume. Forget the recipe just watch it for the laughs!
- Key Lime Sables
- What's not to love about key lime?
Food Network's Sugar Cookie Recipe Box
- Alton Brown's Sugar Cookie Recipe
- Easy cut-outs rolled out on powdered sugar.
- Colette Peters' Basic Sugar Cookie Recipe : : Food Network
- Basic dough uses corn syrup as a sweetener. Cut out cookies using thin cardboard templates.
- 3-in-1 Sugar Cookies Recipe : Food Network Kitchens : Food Network
- Roll, mold or refrigerate these cookies. Orange zest is the flavoring.
- Monogrammed Sugar Cookies Recipe : Paula Deen : Food Network
- *Cook's Note: You can use premade cookie dough or use the recipe to make almond flavored cookies from scratch.
- Sugar Cookies with Pistachio and Dried Cherries Recipe : Robin Miller : Food Network
- Uses premade refrigerated sugar cookie dough.
- Painted Sugar Cookies Recipe : : Food Network
- Use colored corn syrup to paint the cookies.
- Kourabiedes (Greece): Walnut Sugar Cookies Recipe : Food Network Kitchens : Food Network
- These are a Greek celebration cookie. Flavored with a touch of brandy and orange flower water.
- Stained Glass Wreath Cookies Recipe : Sandra Lee : Food Network
- Uses premade refrigerated cookie dough and melted hard candy.
- Chewy Sugar Cookies Recipe : Gale Gand : Food Network
- Buttermilk and a cup of butter in these. You can also roll the cookies in the sugar sprinkles before baking.
Soft Lofthouse-Type Sugar Cookie Recipe
Sugar Cookie News
- Red Valentine's Day desserts: Recipes for cakes, cupcakes, cheesecakes, cookies
- Here's a list of the best and most popular RED Valentine's Day Dessert Recipes right here! Strawberry Cheesecake, Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and White Chocolate Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake will have you licking your fingers?and your ...
- RECIPE: Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies
- To submit your homemade recipe, e-mail it along with a photo and story about why you like this recipe to jeremie.smith@patch.com. Related Topics: How to make Valentine's Day sugar cookies, Valentine's Day Guide, Valentine's Day sugar cookie, ...
- How To Make Scrumptious Golden Almond Cookie
- Have you been looking for a simple cookie recipe that is both delicious and only requires a few ingredients? There may be several out there, but none quite as good as this enticing take on a sugar cookie. This recipe calls for only 3 ingredients, ...
- Sweet Eats | Royal icing rules
- Royal icing has a flawless, smooth surface,turning a plain ol' sugar cookie into a hi-falootin' work of art. But don't been fooled. This icing it is something anyone can tackle. For the best results, you'll want to use a real great sugar cookie recipe ...
Sugar Cookie Murder
Something to read while the cookies bake
Sugar Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen Holiday Mysteries)
Amazon Price: $3.49 (as of 02/13/2012)
The annual Christmas Buffet is the final test of the recipes Hannah Swensen has collected for the 'Lake Eden Holiday Buffet Cookbook'. But Hannah soon has a murder to solve.
What's Cookin'?
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Pangionedevelopers
Jan 29, 2012 @ 1:16 pm | delete
- great job
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davespeed
Jan 20, 2012 @ 8:22 pm | delete
- Aren't sugar cookies just the best? Wish I had some with a glass of milk right now. By the way, I was surprised to learn that Seventeen magazine was being published in the '40s! Nice lens!
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DianeStafford
Jan 14, 2012 @ 8:21 am | delete
- great lens full of cookie making and decorating tips, yummy :-)
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SplashPro
Jan 2, 2012 @ 4:22 am | delete
- Nice lens, I am already dying to get one from your recipe. Thanks for sharing
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Jan 1, 2012 @ 12:48 pm | delete
- Great lens - I don't tend to make cookies too often as my daughter won't eat them - but they are definitely a weakness of mine!
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