Good Basic Sugar Cookie Recipe
Plus Buttercream Frosting Recipe

Everyone knows that Santa Claus loves sugar cookies and milk when he drops by on Christmas Eve with gifts. Santa especially loves homemade sugar cookies decorated by the kids or the young-at-heart.

We’ve been making Christmas sugar cookies at my house for as far back as I can remember. Making sugar cookies is just as much fun as eating sugar cookies. The boys always have great fun making the sugar cookies and decorating them.

Our sugar cookie recipe for Christmas is a thicker, softer style of sugar cookie, similar to the frosted cookies sold at Wal-Mart in the bakery section. I actually prefer the thin, crisp sugar cookies with sugar sprinkles, but I find that most kids prefer the thicker, cake-like taste of the holiday sugar cookies. Puffy sugar cookies also work much better for decorating. It’s hard to frost a brittle sugar cookie.

Sugar Cookie Recipe

 1 cup margarine or butter (2 sticks)
 1 cup sugar
 2 eggs
 2 tsp vanilla
 3 ½ cups plain flour
 2 tsp baking powder

Directions:

Put margarine/butter out to soften. It’s much easier to mix the cookies if the margarine/butter isn’t rock hard.

Mix the softened margarine/butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.

Add the flour and baking powder and mix well.

Chill the dough for a couple of hours. It’s too sticky to roll out when it’s warm and just mixed.
Take a 1/4 to 1/2 cup of flour (plain or self rising) and sprinkle it on the area where you’ll roll out the dough. You can also use a combination of flour and powdered sugar – half and half. This is to prevent the dough from sticking to the counter or mat.

Put a little flour in your hand (1 TBS or so) and rub the outside of the rolling pen. If you don’t have a rolling pen, you can use a tall glass with straight sides. Just roll smaller amounts of dough at a time, because a glass is not near as long as a rolling pen. You’ll also need to sprinkle a little more flour on top of the dough as it’s rolled, since glass won’t hold the flour like a wooden rolling pen.

Take about half the dough out of the bowl and stick the rest back in the refrigerator to keep it chilled. Roll with the rolling pen or glass going up and down and side to side to make a big circle with a thickness of 1/4 inch.

Use shaped cookie cutters to cut out cookies. If you don’t have cookie cutters, a glass will do. You’ll have traditional round sugar cookies. A thin glass works best. A biscuit cutter is great if you have one.
While cutting out cookies, preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Place the cookies on a lightly greased or Pam sprayed cookie sheet. Use your fingers to brush off any excess flour that may be on top of the cookie from the rolling.

Bake for 10 to 15 minutes. The cookies should be set and very lightly browned at the edges but still light colored.

Let the cookies cool before frosting.

A basic butter cream frosting works great with Christmas sugar cookies.

Butter Cream Frosting for Sugar Cookies

 1/2 cup butter or margarine (1 stick)
 1 box 10X powered sugar (around 3 cups if using a bulk bag)
 1 tsp vanilla flavoring
 2 to 3 TBS milk
 Food coloring
 Sugar sprinkles (for after the cookies are frosted)

Directions:

Again, let the butter/margarine sit out and soften. That makes mixing much easier, and it’s also easier to get the correct consistency when adding the milk. If the butter is cold, then it gets too thin as it warms up. If this does happen, just add a little more powdered sugar.

Cream the butter and powdered sugar putting in about a half cup of powdered sugar at time. If the powdered sugar looks pretty lumpy, it’s a good idea to sift it, so you don’t have sugar balls in the frosting. Mix well.

Add the vanilla. Mix.

Add around 1 TBS of milk and mix. Continue adding a tsp or so until the frosting is the right consistency for spreading. If you discover you’ve made it too thin, stir in a little sugar. If it’s too thick or starts to get too thick as you decorate add just a tiny bit more milk and stir.

Add a couple of drops of food coloring and mix if you want a single color batch. It’s more fun, however, to divide the frosting into small bowls and let everyone make a color. Be warned that some people (mostly boys) will put in all the colors and make ugly brown frosting. It still tastes great. And, this really is about having fun.

If you want sugar sprinkles, then take some regular table sugar. Put a 1/4 to 1/2 cup or so in a zip lock bag. Add a little squirt of food coloring. Squeeze the bag until the sugar is all colored. It's fun also to divide the sugar out and make various colors like with the frosting.

Sprinkle on the colored sugar. You may need to very lightly tap the sugar on top of the frosting if the frosting is starting to set.

If you want the sugar sprinkles but not buttercream frosting, then make up the colored sugar and pat that on before baking the sugar cookies. If you try to put colored sugar on cookies without frosting after they're baked, the sugar will not stick.