Christmas Sugar Cookies | Vanilla Butter Cookies

About the Christmas Sugar Cookies

An easy-peasy cookie recipe to ease out your Christmas week cooking. These are your typical vanilla biscuits, only softer & melt in the mouth. These cookies are highly versatile, can be cut and molded into any shape, very easy-to-handle dough, doesn't require pre-freezing either. So there is no wait time at all. You can have them with sprinkled icing sugar, buttercream icing, royal icing, or dipped in chocolate.

These cookies when being cut & going in the oven are a little tender but they hold their shape perfectly – as you can see in the pictures.

Cooking Method
Cuisine
Courses ,
Difficulty Intermediate
Time
Prep Time: 25 min Cook Time: 12 min Total Time: 37 mins
Servings 40
Description

These Christmas Sugar Cookies, have the most basic and readily available ingredients and thus don't require much work in procuring and shopping.

The key ingredients are flour, butter & sugar, which makes the dough easy to handle and can be scrunched up and rolled up again over and over until you’ve used up every last bit of dough.

They are plain, sweet vanilla cookies and are perfect for icing and decorating as you please.

Happy Baking :)

 

Ingredients
    Ingredients for the Sugar Cookies
  • 1 cup Unsalted Butter
  • 1 Large Egg (at room temperature)
  • 1.5 teaspoon Vanilla extract/ essence
  • 1 cup caster/superfine sugar/granulated/ordinary white sugar
  • 3 cups All purpose flour/ Maida
  • 3/4 teaspoons Baking Powder
  • 3/4 teaspoons Salt
  • Ingredients for the Buttercream Icing (Will give you 1 Cup of icing)
  • 1.5 cup confectioners' sugar
  • 3 tablespoons Butter softened
  • 1 tablespoon Vanilla extract
  • 1 tablespoon milk, or more as needed
  • 1 drop of each food colour that you require.
Instructions
    Instructions to Make Christmas Sugar Cookies
  1. Whip butter and sugar in a large bowl until fluffy 
  2. Now add egg and vanilla, and whisk until completely combined.

  3. Now add flour, baking powder, and salt and mix slowly, then whisk until the flour is combined well – it will be clumpy and getting to look like dough.
  4. Now on the table or mat or any work surface of your choice, sprinkle some flour and scrape the dough out of the bowl. Pat together then cut in half, then shape into 2 balls.
  5. Start with one ball of dough & roll into to 0.3cm / 1/8" (for crispier cookies) or 0.6cm / 1/4" (for softer cookies), sprinkling with flour under and over the dough so it doesn't stick.
  6. Preheat Oven to 180°C / 350°F (160°C fan). If you have a convection setting in microwave, preheat on 180 deg
  7. Now cut the cookies as per your choice using the cookie cutters and use a knife or spatula to transfer cut cookies into the prepared baking tray. (Keep the remaining dough that doesn’t fit in the oven in the fridge so that they are not sticky).

  8. Bake for 10 minutes, until the surface is pale golden and the edges are just beginning to turn light golden. They get slightly harder and retain shape once they get cooled so there is no need to overbake.

  9. Allow cookies to cool completely on trays (they will finish cooking on the trays as I mentioned before).
  10. Instructions for buttercream icing
  11. In a large bowl beat sugar, butter, vanilla, and 1 tablespoon of milk until creamy. 

  12. Mix in more milk, 1 to 2 drops at a time, to reach desired spreading consistency. 

  13. Stir in food coloring and use.

Note
  • Stays good in an airtight container for a week. After this, they are still edible but they tend to dry, Keeping refrigerated gives them a better shelf life.
  • The dough stays well frozen too , if packed in an air tight wrap in the freezer, for up to 3 months.
  • 8-12 mins is the baking time depending on the heat your oven/microwave generates, keep an eye on the first batch then you are good and you ill have a hang.
  • The number of cookies will depend on cookie cutter size and how thick you roll your dough
Keywords: Sugar cookies, Christmas cookies, Vanilla cookies, butter cookies, easy cookies, Cookies with icing, Icing, Butter cream.
Shruti M
Food Blogger

I have been cooking for a long time, I work to make my recipes interesting for advanced cooks but still accessible for beginners. I like to keep it simple & authentic to the best of my knowledge.

I approach cooking with an emphasis on family-friendly food and the tastiest ways to eat healthy together! When not in my kitchen, I’m often reading or painting, and exploring the best food locations whenever I can.

Food has a special ability to bring people together. I often find this in my own life and I hope you will find that this online community feels just as welcoming as a real kitchen. For me, cooking together builds the best communities, let’s get cooking together!

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