It's the 7th day of the month, which means it's Crazy Cooking Challenge time.
This month's theme was sugar cookies. I wasn't too excited about this because baking isn't my thing, and cookies are my least favorite thing to bake even when I do feel like baking. And Christmas sugar cookies are the worst kind of cookies because you have to make the dough, refrigerate it for so long, then roll it out with a rolling pin, and cut out all the shapes, blah, blah, blah. I am far too lazy for all that! I have a serious aversion to any recipe that calls for a rolling pin. If I read a recipe that I'm interested in and I come across a sentence that starts with, "Roll out. . . " I immediately move on. I still wanted to participate this month though, so I started looking through all kinds of sugar cookie recipes for a "cheaters" version. I found it at Lulu The Baker. She calls them "No Chill, No Roll Sugar Cookies". Sounded good to me! And they looked cute and could still be easily decorated, so that was the recipe for me. I got the frosting recipe from her too. I'm calling them "Lazy Baker Sugar Cookies." I had never done the whole baking-sugar-cookies-and-decorating-them thing with my two girls, so we made an afternoon of it.
Lazy Baker Sugar Cookies
Ingredients:
½ cup butter, softened
½ cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg
2½ cups flour
¾ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp milk
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°.
In a large bowl, cream butter, shortening, and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla and egg; mix. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Add dry ingredients to butter/sugar and combine. Add milk and stir until completely incorporated.
Roll dough into tablespoon-sized balls and place on a greased baking sheet. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until cookies are just beginning to turn golden on the edges. Remove from oven and cool completely before frosting.
Frosting:
Combine 1 stick softened butter, 1 tsp vanilla, 4 cups powdered sugar, and 2-4 tbsp milk. Beat until fluffy. Add food coloring as desired.
Makes 3½ dozen (2”) cookies.
The only change I made to the cookie recipe was that I changed ½ tsp baking soda to 1 tsp baking powder because I went to put in the baking soda and found I was out. Whoops! My husband was working and there was no way I was dragging my two kids to the store just for that, so I tried using the baking powder instead, and they came out perfectly. I know that baking powder isn't a substitute for baking soda, but since it worked, I'm going with it!
I love how the cookies turned out. Perfectly round, soft, but not so soft that they fell apart. I used my Pampered Chef stoneware and they were perfectly cooked without browning at all.
Here are the pics of my two little girls helping me make these cookies. Lena (4 and a half) in the blue shirt, and Eva (2 and a half) in the pink.
Eva helping me mix the dough.
Lena's turn.
Eva is the type who does not like anything on her hands. After she rolled her first cookie, she waved her hands in my face, saying "dirty, dirty, dirty!" She wanted me to wash them in between each cookie roll.
Can you tell which ones I rolled, which ones Lena rolled, and which ones Eva "rolled"?
I set up four different colors of frosting: white, red, green, and brown. The brown was for the little reindeer kit I got. I used food coloring to make the brown, then afterwards it hit me that I should have just used cocoa powder. Duh!
The reindeer kit. I think our cookies were a bit small for it, but oh well.
Waiting patiently to begin.
Eva and her first cookie.
Cute, and tastes good too!
Sampling the artwork.
My reindeer cookie. I used chocolate sprinkles to make it look furry.
Lena and her reindeer cookie.
This is how a 2-year-old does sprinkles.
My husband jumped in after he was done working and made a couple too. He made the wreath at the top. I made the Christmas tree, the red bow on green background, and the white with red swirls. Eva's are the ones with bites out of them.
The prettiest ones.
The red sprinkles were cinnamon-flavored and the red-and-white ones were peppermint-flavored.
Here are all of the ones that we made. Lena made all of the ones with mounds of blue sprinkles, because blue is her favorite color.
The mess we created. Holy moly! My lovely husband offered to do clean-up. What a saint!
I had lots of fun making these cookies with my kids. This will definitely be my go-to recipe for sugar cookies from now on.
I love your cookies...and, that you have such good help! Decorating Christmas cookies has been a long standing tradition at our house...while my daughters have been on their own for a while, they still love to get together to make cookies. I wasn't able to participate this month as I am visiting my four month old granddaughter in Seattle....Happy Holidays!
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Thank you, Kathy. You too!
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