 guess you would just get rid of this attractive cookie dough and let it go to waste at this point. Sugar cookies are nostalgia in a bite. They're all the things that I love about baking. Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, they are the thing that I want to eat no matter what emotions I'm feeling. They aren't always there for me. I'm gonna show you the science and the foundation of sugar cookies. It's elementary. I'm Lauren. I'm a food editor at the Spruce Eats and today we are making sugar cookies. We are diving into all things about the classic sugar cookie, crispy crunchy on the exterior, soft on the inside. This is your basic recipe to make the perfect cookie for you. Then we'll get into sheet pan cookie bars. This cookie has those crisp edges but at the same time it has more of a cakey interior. Then we're going to make Italian butter cookies. So delicate and melt in your mouth just mmm. And once we've mastered all of these recipes you can really make any kind of cookie that you love. So we're going to start off with the classic sugar cookie. Usually a lot of recipes use a one to two to three ratio of butter, sugar, and flour. I really like that middle ground of one one three. It creates enough flour to give it structure in the cookie dough but it really levels out the amount of butter to sugar to really hone in that richness of the cookie. So I want that crispy exterior and I want a little bit of lift from the leavener to create that like nice cakey exterior but again it has that structure so I can make some really beautiful cutouts. We're going to start off with of course butter. Spend more money and get the really nice European butter versus skimping on this bit. Then I'm going to add granulated sugar. So we're just going to whip these together. You really just kind of like want to let it go and cream together and it will take a little bit. With the creaming you're whipping in more air. When you whip in the air it helps for the dough to rise more because it creates these air pockets that then the leavener releases that carbon dioxide and kind of puffs up a bit. If you don't cream it sometimes the sugar in the butter will create clumps and it creates more of a dense cookie. It's at that stage. It's light and fluffy. You can see it kind of like stands up on its own. So I'm just going to add my vanilla. So with the vanilla I actually really like to add almond extract. I love almond extract and honestly everything. Almond extract or amaretto if you're feeling spicy. All right so then we're going to crack the egg in. I'm just doing one whole egg. So I'm just combining all of the more wet ingredients first. If I try to throw everything in at once it will not only be impossible to combine but it will also over beat that gluten into the cookie and it will make it not as delicious as we will make it. All right I have ap flour here. I already have some salt. I'm going to add baking powder. I really just want to mix in a little bit as I go to again not over beat it. Just enough so that way it doesn't fly everywhere because it'll keep mixing in as we add more. So now we're just going to beat it until you see it come together in a uniform dough. It'll peel away from the sides and it will become one dough. So now I'm going to put some flour on my work surface. Just really get in there with your hands. It's kind of like it's a little bit more tacky than a Play-Doh. A little bit more flour. You don't want to put so much flour that it works itself into the dough because that will also affect the end result and it'll make a stodgier biscuit as Paul Holly would say. All right so it's pretty soft. I'm going to roll out my sugar cookies to about a quarter inch thick. These are cookies that I make all year round so I have an array of like doggie bones, mustaches, dinosaurs, the whole shebang. Why limit ourselves? I would love a dinosaur on Christmas Day so do you make your cookies however you want. Let's say your dough is a bit too soft and it's finicky and your house is very warm. You can just as much be like meh I don't want to do this right now. This is being a diva. Put it back in the bowl. Throw it into the fridge. Let it firm up a little bit and then bring it back out in like five to ten minutes. So again this is a traditional sugar cookie so we're cutting these out but later on we're going to be piping some. We're going to make some in a sheet tray and so you just cut them afterwards. So there's a lot of directions that you can go with this recipe. Again it's elementary that's why I love it so much. If you find that your cookie cutter is sticking to your dough too much you can dump it in some flour just to get those edges and then cut. I like to give it a little jostle to release it from the rest of the dough. Another tool I like to have handy is an offset spatula because I can kind of get easily underneath that dough if it's sticking, lift it up and then transfer it to the sheet tray. We're going to spice things up. I'm going to do a little flour action. I love it when it like kind of sticks a little bit because then it's easy transfer. It's funny because as much as I like to say I don't like hoity-toity baking I literally have a trolley cart of all of my baking equipment. I've acquired 50 plus cookie cutters that are now in a container like this big. Why? I don't know. I think I can fit one more. Go dinosaur again. So this baking sheet is full. I'm gonna pop it into the freezer. Once I'm done rolling out this next sheet tray that one will be all firmed up. Pop that in the oven and we'll just like keep going in this little party like that. Alright these have been in the freezer for about five to ten minutes. They feel firm to the touch. They're not gonna lose their shape. I'm gonna put them in the oven for about 15. Probably check them at 10. See where they're at. Okay my classic sugar cookies are done. These are completely cooled down. They are nice golden brown around the edges. Now is one of I think the most integral parts of sugar cookie cutouts is icing them and decorating them. I really enjoy icing them with a royal icing and then put any kind of flavoring into it. You know me. I love oven extract so I'm probably gonna put that in it. I do this one to kind of like a medium thickness and so when I'm letting it go off it leaves these ribbons. I would say my biggest tip is you are going to mess up. It takes a lot of practice and just be patient and be kind yourself. So now I'm just gonna put like a thick nice amount in this and I kind of just like let that even out and kind of spread out and while that's doing its thing I might go to another one. I would hold it a little bit above this line and it's gonna kind of guide you and then kind of release a little bit before you get to that end and just let it kind of fall off. So real quick I'm gonna come back over here and then I might just kind of like maneuver it. I don't want to make it come to this border. I also will kind of like smack it and really even out the frosting. Some of those time lapses on Instagram make it look really easy and quick but this actually takes a really long time so I'm gonna pull in some help. I'm gonna regret this I think probably. No no no you're gonna be great. It's not precious. Yeah. What do you want to do? Do you want to pipe out some intricate designs? Not that one. What is your arc telling you? What do we can do a color? Let's do like a pink purple. I have some really fun sprinkles I'm going to throw on. It's beautiful. I don't know why. I mean it wasn't. You're doing it. Ta-da. We're having so much fun. This is a cookie decorating party so there are no rules really. Alright I'm gonna let you finish these okay. Okay. Thanks so much. Bye. Bye. Alright we're gonna do a couple more things. Let's do some flowers. Kind of hold it at like a 45 degree angle. Rotate it a little bit. If you have any fun tips tricks that you want to share or you have any questions in terms of decorating please comment below. I would love to hear it. Let's talk about it. Let's chat. I'm always down to decorate. I like to also paint on colors. Let's say you want to get really fancy. I have some edible markers that I use. Sometimes if I'm doing some more intricate designs. So really like do what you love do what you know and just learn from there. So I'm very impatient and I just want to eat my cookies now and so I'm gonna try one. So you get a lot of like it's a little bit buttery. You get a lot of obviously the sugar really crispy edges. I'm kind of like fluff in the interior but it's just a classic really simple but it's that simplicity that is just so tasty. So we just made our sugar cookies. We decorated them. They look amazing but in the end I don't always like making those kinds of sugar cookie cutouts because they are so frustrating and finicky. So this is where these sheet pan sugar cookie bars come in hand. You can make them as like an easy midnight snack or you can make it as like a cookie cake for a really good celebration. This cookie has those crisp edges but at the same time it has more of a cakey interior. Just like we did with the classic sugar cookies we're going to cream together the butter and the sugar. I really want to show that anyone can make sugar cookies no matter the tools that you have, no matter the ingredients. The nice thing about a hand mixer too is it's a little bit of an arm workout as you go. So you skip the gym today. You really have to work for it. So I'm trying to get all of these chunks. The brown sugar likes to clump together a little bit more than granulated. So you really want to make sure that you knock out all of those because you don't want big clumps of sugar. We're really looking for that same aeration and creaming that we did in the classic sugar cookie. That is such an integral part of cookies in general. So you really don't want to rush through it. So now I'm going to add my flavor. I have vanilla and almond extract. Like I said I love almond extract so I add it as much as I can. I'm going to mix this in and then we're going to add our eggs. Again I like to crop my eggs into a separate bowl because knowing me and my clunky hands, I usually get some shells in there or like I just did, I drop the shell into it or onto the counter. Alright so I have three eggs. I'm going to add those in and kind of like on a low slow speed so this doesn't squirt everywhere. And like the classic recipe, I'm going to mix all of my dry ingredients together and then we're going to add it in increments into the wet ingredients. So I have AP flour and then I'm also adding bread flour. Bread flour has a higher protein content so it actually is going to make a chewier texture in the end. Add in some salt, again some baking powder. Alright so I've mixed that together. So I'm going to add about a third of the flour. It might work a little bit in before I start the mixer. Again if you try to put it all in at once, you'll most likely get some flour pockets that you don't want and then that will create an uneven cookie. So the classic sugar cookie dough, again let's talk about ratios. It is ideally a one to one to three ratio of butter and sugar to flour. So it's a higher ratio of flour. This sugar cookie dough is more of a one two three. It gives enough fat so that you have that buttery texture to it but it has a little bit more sugar that helps with it give a lift and it's a little bit more cakey and blondie in the center. This is done together. It's a very soft dough. You could definitely not roll this out and cut it into shapes or you would have a very frustrating day on your hands. It is very tacky so it can be kind of hard to spread so I like to put little plops all over. There's no rhyme or reason to this. It's just kind of whatever you want to do. So kind of at this point I like to spray my hands a little bit with baking spray. It helps so it doesn't necessarily stick to your hands and it's very easy to kind of press it in. So you just kind of want one uniform layer. Once I get to the point where it's kind of spread out as much as I can kind of do with my own hands that's when I'll come in with an offset. This is really to make sure it stays even because you don't want one side that's thicker than the other side because this side will obviously finish and be really really crispy crunchy and then this side will be under baked. So now the most exciting part. I'm going to quadrant my sheet pan off and I'm going to make little sections of toppings because let's say I have very fussy people in my hands that one wants chocolate chips, the other one wants sprinkles, the other one wants to be fancy and they want peppermint candies. Well I can do that because I have a sheet tray and I can just do whatever I want. I think that the peppermint candy gives such a fun flavor profile to the sugar cookies. It really reminds me of kind of like some more nostalgic sugar cookies that I would buy in the grocery store with my mom when I was growing up. And this is honestly something that I do year-round. It doesn't matter the holiday or anything. I love that kind of like mintiness that it gives to the sugar cookie because there is a lot of sugar in sugar cookies so it's nice to kind of balance that out. I have some candy pecans. Something else you could also just not top them and bake it whole and then you could make like a nice cream cheese buttercream frosting and frost them. You could easily turn this into the most low-key cake situation. So it's like little effort lots of reward. Love that. We're going to end this with sprinkles of course. I don't know who doesn't love sprinkles. So they're nice they're beautiful they're not baked yet so I'm going to put them into the oven for about 20 to 25 minutes. When I know that they're done they'll be golden brown around the edges. All right our sheet pan cookie bars just came out of the oven. They are cool to the touch. There's like these really nice golden edges. It's a little bit soft in the center so you can slice and dice these however you want. This is really nice in terms of how it's sectioned off. It will help guide me as I'm cutting. I also like these like little pieces that get kind of like a mix. So like here you have some chocolate and peppermint. That person is going to go on a flavor ride. I love a sprinkle but I'm really feeling the peppermint candy. So much like the classic sugar cookie you're going to have those nice crunchy crispy edges. These will be a little bit more chewy in the middle. Yeah this is that perfect mixture of like do I want cake do I want cookies. I want a cookie bar because it's really really soft and moist in the middle but then you still get that crispy really crunchy bits that I love about a cookie. So these are perfect for kind of like that last-minute treat or you really want to make someone something special but you're like man don't really feel like going out of my way maybe. So you can just throw it all into a sheet pan and then in no time you kind of have these really delicious beautiful cookie bars and really everyone gets a bite of what they want. All right on our sugar cookie journey we are now at Italian butter cookies so we've made the classic sugar cookie we've made sheet pan sugar cookie bars and now we are at Italian butter cookies so what is the difference. Italian butter cookies have a one to about two ratio in terms of butter and sugar to flour. Classic sugar cookie had a one to three. This cookie dough is really easy to pipe because of the high fat content in it between the butter and the egg. The classic sugar cookie would be very very frustrating to pipe out because it has a higher ratio of flour and it's just a lot tackier and structurally sound than this one is. So if you tried to push it through a piping bag it would be beyond frustrating and you would yell at me. So I'm going to start like all of them I'm going to add my butter to my mixer. So because this has butter in the name Italian butter cookies you really want to have good butter. I would kind of splurge for a more like a European butter or one that has a higher fat content to the moisture level in it. American butter tends to have a higher water ratio in it so the European butter will be really nice and rich. All right so I add granulated sugar and now I'm going to add confectioner. All right so we're going to cream this together. You really want to get to the color consistency where it's really almost like white in color whereas the other one was a little bit had like a yellow tint. This one's going to go for a while because we want to aerate it. That is really adding to the structure of this cookie and it's really the essence of this cookie. It creates more of those air pocket for the carbon dioxide to release and and really give it that lift that it needs because it does have less of that flour content. If the butter isn't creamed enough it's going to be much firmer and it's going to be a lot harder to pipe and you're going to be really frustrated with me in the end. All right this is where I want it to that point where it's like really luscious and just it looks like I want to just eat it out of the bowl but we're making cookies so I'm just going to save you from that. All right now I'm going to add my flavor. I'm adding vanilla to this again. I'm going to come back to it every time. Almond extract. I also think that also like brings out a lot of those classic Italian flavors so I'm going to whip that in just until combined. We're going to wipe down the sides a bit because you whip it so much it's almost like stiff peaks. All right in terms of eggs I'm doing one egg yolk and one whole egg. The reason I'm not doing two whole eggs is because it ends up bringing too much moisture to the cookie and it will make it spread a lot more. I want the fat from the egg to add richness, a little bit of browning to the cookie but I also want just enough moisture that it's pliable enough for me to pipe it. Now we are going to add our leavener baking powder to our flour just AP flour. Always add salt because it bumps up all the other flavors that are in the recipe and then it also makes it so it's not overly sweet. It really balances everything out. So like all the other recipes that we've done we cream the butter and the sugar together then we add any kind of flavorings whether that's spice or extracts, add in the eggs just until combined and now we're adding in the flour and the leavener. So you can get to the point where maybe you have a couple streaks of flour left behind but you don't want to over mix it. You can wait and then mix in the rest, fold in the rest with a rubber spatula and that's totally fine. This dough is extremely soft which is great because again we are piping it and so we don't want a really tough cold dough so again that is why everything should be at room temperature. I put about a third of the cookie dough into the piping bag. Take it out, squeeze it down. If you put a lot of the cookie dough in it it will be really hard to pipe out and then you just keep refilling as you go. I hold it kind of low. I'm going to do some little circles, some little squiggles. I like to do little horns. Something else I like to do is dip my finger in some water. It helps for like that easy release from the piping bag. You can also go back with this little bit of water and even out any of your ends to make it a little bit neater. I like these shapes so we'll just keep moving. Alright so another shape that you can do say I want to pipe a circle and then I almost want to make like a thumbprint so I can use measuring spoons, dip it in some water so it doesn't stick, press it in the middle and then when it bakes you kind of have this vessel that you could put jelly, you could jam, you could put Nutella, some ganache, whatever you want in the center of that. Again these are shapes that I'm really familiar with and that I like but I mean do you. I like to jazz it up a little bit. I have non-pareil sprinkles. These are the sprinkles that are the little balls. These are at really any grocery store so I'm going to top a couple with these and let them bake into it because again this is a very delicate cookie dough. It will spread when it bakes and so we're going to freeze these until they're really firm to the touch so we have some cookies already chilled and ready to pop into the oven. I know when they're ready is because I can easily handle them and touch them. Normally I wouldn't be able to do this but I can because they are frozen and ready to go. I know when they're done because they are very very very lightly golden around the edges. I don't want them brown. My Italian butter cookies are cooled they're ready to go. I'm going to do a couple different decorations to really judge them up. I like dipping just a little bit of the cookie in chocolate because I think it adds a little bit of depth, a little bit of richness. The butter cookies are very delicate so you don't want to really overpower them with the amount of chocolate that you do. So I love a sprinkle moment but you also don't have to use sprinkles if you don't want to. I like the non-pareils for this because they're not as kind of clunky. This may be the larger sprinkles but again that's a personal preference. So up to you. So some of these I'm going to sandwich. You don't really want anything chunky because it will be really hard to sandwich them. You also don't need a lot. You don't want it kind of pouring out the sides of the cookie. After they kind of sit for a little bit the jam kind of like seeps into the cookie. It makes them even softer and it's just like one fluid bite. That said if you are sandwiching them they kind of only last a couple days because it is such a delicate cookie so just be wary. The last option that you kind of have here unless you think of other things for some of those cookies that we made kind of into a thumbprint you can take the Nutella and almost just kind of like dollop them on the top even top that with sprinkles. Like I said sky is the limit. This is your foundation. Where you go from here is totally up to you. It's so delicate. It has just the right amount of moisture in it. It's crumbly. It's not crisp like the edges of the cookie bars or the classic sugar cookie. It's nice and crumbly and just like melt in your mouth perfection. It's simplistic. It's not overly sweet. It's just I feel like it's that cookie that will just hit the spot every single time. Today we went into a sugar coma. We made our classic sugar cookies really crispy crunchy on the outside a little bit fluffy in the interior. We decorated them beautifully. Then I got into our sheet pan sugar cookie bars still on those nice crispy edges but a little bit cakeier and chewier in the middle. Then we went into the more intricate Italian butter cookies. This is the melt in your mouth really crumbly delicate cookie that I love all the time. If I had to pick one I think you know I'm going to go for the Italian butter cookie but regardless once you've mastered all of these you really can make any cookie recipe. What's your favorite way to decorate cookies? Let me know in the comments below and make sure you subscribe to The Spruce Eats.