Last week, in preparation for a whole weekend of entertaining/babysitting two boys, I prepared an activity to do with them, which was cutting and making Christmas sugar cookies. I ended up not doing this activity with them but I still had the dough that I made beforehand. Honestly, while I have cut out sugar cookies in the past, I never made the dough from scratch. For the dough, I used this recipe, which I chose out of the simplicity of its ingredients and the fact that I had everything needed in my kitchen.

The dough was pretty straightforward in terms of cookie-making; I reduced the size of the dough by half. First was creaming the butter and sugar, then adding the other wet ingredients, followed by the dry ingredients. I then chilled the dough in the fridge for several days overnight.

Where things got a little murky was when I had to roll out the dough. I let it soften on the counter for about thirty minutes and got to rolling it on a generously floured surface. I was a little concerned if I was using too much flour, treating the cookie dough like it was pie dough. Because of this, I ended up patting off some excess flour when needed. I also didn’t go into rolling out this dough with a certain thickness in mind and just rolled out something that was probably closer to 1/16″ in thickness, rather than 1/8″.

As a result, my cookies baked fairly thin, already browning at the edges at 350F at ~9 minutes. I had a variety of different Christmas cookie cutters (probably collected from a certain housemate during my first year out) and used them to cut out shapes from the dough–from candy canes to Christmas light bulbs. After rolling out, cutting out cookies, and rolling out scraps, I managed to cut out ~20 cookies.

I baked a test batch of six cookies and refrigerated the rest of the cut out cookies to be chilled and prepared the next day. I didn’t notice a significant difference between immediately baking these cookies vs. letting them be chilled. Or maybe because I really didn’t care enough.

These cookies ended up baking pretty quickly since they were so thin. They required less baking time. In hindsight, to avoid the crispness factor, I would have rolled out the dough to be a little thicker. For some cookies, I spread over some Christmas-themed sprinkles to be baked with the cookies.

So now, I had holiday appropriate snacks, which I later brought to work for a spotanenous holiday cookie giveaway.

Overall, these sugar cookies tasted like sugar cookies, nothing too special about them. I also liked the fact that the dough was easily put together at any time from things found in my pantry. Even though these cookies ended up being rolled out pretty thin, I ended up liking how thin they are since they delicately snapped and broke away in your mouth like wafers. It was also a bit therapeutic for me to cut out different cookie shapes, Christmas-related. It was like a calming time of crafts for one. This is one of the most chillest experiences I had making something.

Probably would make again for next Christmas.