 Welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach. I'm on Weight Watchers and I count calories and macros. I am dressed in all the holiday spirit. We have Christmas earrings. We have a Christmas shirt from Christmas Vacation, my favorite movie. I've got a red and green eye look on today. I am in the holiday spirit because today we're baking. We are making my all time famous frosted sugar cookies. I get so many requests for these every single year. And this year I have several holiday parties to attend. I would love to give cookies to my neighbors, to my in-laws, to my boot camp group. So I have a lot of my famous frosted sugar cookies to make. So if you're excited to see the recipe, give this video a big huge thumbs up. Make sure you're subscribed and your bell notification is turned on. I upload five videos a week. And Sunday we always do something a little bit different, a little bit fun, including holiday baking. Down in the description box, you will find nutrition coaching where I offer personalized to you macros and calories. Highly recommend. This is how I've lost over 130 pounds. And I have one-on-one coaching for accountability as well. Links, discounts to my favorite things, and come join our Facebook group. We would love to have you. So let's get in the kitchen and start making these famous frosted sugar cookies. So to get started on our sugar cookies, the first thing we need to do is make the dough. It does have to be refrigerated for quite a while and we do not want to skip this step. So let me show you what is in our sugar cookies. I'm going to give you some low point, low calorie alternatives as well. But the first thing you're going to need is some all purpose flour. Now here's a quick substitution you can make. You could always substitute out the Kodiak protein power flour. This is less point and you're going to get 10 grams of protein per serving, which is a quarter cup. So there's quite a bit of flour in this recipe. So by subbing this in place of regular flour, you can say points, calories, and get in some protein. And honestly, you cannot tell the difference. You're also going to need sugar. You could substitute out any sugar alternative. My recommendation would be Lakonto granulated. I will link Lakonto down below for you with 15% off site-wide. You're also going to need some vanilla extract, almond extract. Natmeg is my secret ingredient that I like to put into my cookie dough. You'll need some eggs, baking powder, and then unsalted butter. Now I have salted butter, so I'm not going to add any additional salt. If you use unsalted butter, you'll need to add some salt to your recipe as well. And one other quick modification, you could use a light butter in place of regular butter. Let me pull out my stand mixer for the one time a year that I use it and let's make some cookie dough. So the first thing we're going to do is add our flour and our baking soda. I am doubling the recipe because like I said, I have lots of cookies to make so I have four and a half cups of all-purpose flour. And this is all the baking powder I have, which lucky for me is exactly what I need, which is one teaspoon. And then we're going to mix that together really well. I was thinking I may have to make a quick run to the store for baking powder, but luckily we are good to go. It is now on my grocery list for next week. So I'm using the Kirkland grass-fed butter, which is basically like the Kerry Gold butter. Each one of these is 227 grams. The recipe calls for three quarters of a stick of butter times two. So basically one and a half sticks of butter or 340 grams. So because these are bigger than traditional sticks of butter, I'm just going to weigh out 340 grams of room temperature softened butter. In traditional butter, it's going to be one and a half sticks. So it'd be three sticks for me if I doubled the recipe, but I'll put the original recipe, of course, on my website. And then to the butter, I'm adding one and a half cups of granulated sugar. In our stand mixer or using a handheld mixer, you're going to cream your butter and sugar together. And we're going to add in our vanilla extract. We want about four teaspoons total. And then half a teaspoon or so of almond extract. And then two eggs at room temperature. And then we're going to beat that together on high for about one minute. I can smell the almond extract and it smells so good. You always want to scrape down the sides of your bowl and then re-mix as needed. We're going to add in our dry ingredients. I like to do it in stages. So I'm going to add about half, mix it and then add the other half. This is also where I'm going to add in some nutmeg. I do about a teaspoon of nutmeg. I'm telling you it's the secret ingredient and it adds such a good flavor to the cookies. So here is what our cookie dough looks like. I'm going to get this rolled into a couple of balls, wrap it in some saran wrap. And I like to throw it in the fridge for at least a couple of hours, but you can literally leave your dough in the fridge for one to two days. So every good baker tastes the cookie dough. So we interrupt this cookie baking video for coffee. I am actually running to Starbucks to grab four shots of espresso in a venti cup. And then I'm going to throw in a protein shake because listen, we need a second coffee today to make it through all this cookie baking. Merry Christmas night, on this night, on this night, on this merry Christmas night, on this night, on this night. We have secured the goods back to holiday baking. Three hours later. So I just pulled the first batch of dough out of the refrigerator. I've got all of my shaped cookie cutters. I actually bought these at Target a couple of years ago. They're really, really nice quality. And I want to say they were like a dollar a piece. They may actually still have them available. You're also going to need some flour. We want to make sure we flour our surface before we roll out our cookie dough. I also like to dip my cookie cutters in flour before I cut out the cookie from the dough. Get a little flour on your rolling pin and then start rolling out your dough. I like a nice, thick cookie. That's another one of my little tricks, one of my little pro tips is to roll your dough out pretty thick. I think the cookies taste a lot better the thicker they are. I have two baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Once I cut the cookies out, I like to immediately put them onto the baking sheet, add a little flour to your cutter and then start cutting out your shapes. So here's what the cookies look like. Here's the thickness. So like I said, I definitely like them a little bit more on the thick side. Add them to your baking sheet and then I re-roll out the same dough and repeat until I have finished this whole section of dough. So make sure you space them out pretty good on your baking sheet, like an inch, inch and a half apart. So both my baking sheets are ready to go. These are going into a 350 degree oven for about 10 to 12 minutes. You want them to be golden brown on the bottom but not baked too much where they're not soft in the middle. And while they're in the oven, I just continue rolling out my cookie dough and getting another batch ready. Look at these beautiful cookies baking away. I do have to say that having double ovens is making cookie making this year a lot easier. So I just pulled out the first batch of cookies. They look really good. You can see that they're a little bit brown on the edges but they're pretty blonde on the underneath which is exactly what you want. They will continue to cook as they sit here as well. What I always do is put some saran wrap on my counter and I allow my cookies to cool on that. So I'll go ahead and remove these from the sheet pan, get another batch into the oven. So my cookies are done. Troy just counted and we have 34 total. I usually make way more than this and this was a double batch. So heads up, if you need more than 34 cookies, you're gonna want to maybe triple or quadruple the batch but I'm gonna let these cool completely and then we'll start frosting and decorating. So for frosting, I know that this may sound weird but this combination is perfection and that way you don't have to make homemade frosting. In my opinion, this is even better. So I use vanilla frosting. I just bought the Funfetti one so I have the extra sprinkles and then I use cream cheese frosting and I mix these two together and that combination is chef's kiss delicious. So I go ahead and divide the frosting out in the number of bowls that I want and then we'll go ahead and color everything. I don't know what colors. Normally I usually just do red and green but I'm thinking I might incorporate blue and yellow this year too since I have a star and a snowflake. So I didn't realize when I bought the Funfetti that they're already colored. So the green and blue is already done. It'll just be the vanilla frosting and then what we'll end up doing is cream cheese for the red and the yellow. So do not buy the Funfetti one buy just the regular vanilla frosting that's white and then you can mix the vanilla and the cream cheese together. So we're just gonna, we're gonna fly by the seat of our pants. I honestly did not know that the frosting was already colored. I'm going to divide that cream cheese frosting into two separate bowls so that I can color them red and yellow. I'm probably gonna do more red than yellow. So I'll put a little less frosting in the yellow bowl than the red bowl. And then I'm going to add some red food coloring to the bigger bowl of frosting and then mix that in until I have the desired red. I like red red, not a pinky red. So I make sure that I add enough food coloring that I get that nice deep Christmas red. So that actually looks really good. So see how that's a nice deep red not more of a pinky red. And then in this smaller bowl we will go ahead and do yellow. And there's our yellow frosting for the star. We have a lot of blue and we have a lot of green. So we'll make sure that we really focus on those two colors with our cookies. So here's my decorating station. So I have my frosting and then I have lots of options for sprinkles. I actually have this sparkling sugar. This is actually leftover from last year. It looks really pretty on the snowflakes. And then I bought this little mix at Walmart this year. Tons of cute stuff in there. And then I hauled this one from Sprouts. And then I picked this up at Walmart too. I thought these were really cute. I have little gingerbread men and little yellow stars. And then I also have the blue and red funfetti sprinkles that came with the frosting. I do put Saran wrap down on my counter to keep the mess at bay. All the sprinkles and frosting. And then what I like to do is just put my frosted cookies on a sheet pan. And I throw them in the fridge or freezer so that they can set a little bit before I package them up for storage. So my plan is to freeze the cookies that we're going to save for Christmas, even Christmas day. And then the rest of them will get put together for the holiday parties that I have. Everybody's waiting. So here's the first tray of cookies. These look so good. Troy's gonna throw these in the freezer in the garage that'll help set your frosting before you package them up. You want to try to get them partially frozen so the frosting doesn't stick to each other. All right, and cookie tray number two going in to the freezer. I'm going to put together a tray for my boot camp Christmas party. I also whipped together some peppermint cupcakes really quick. I'll show you guys what that tray looks like. But these are my famous frosted sugar cookies. So Troy's got a cookie, no frosting, but what do you think of the cookie? It's so good. Is it soft and crispy or? Yay. Oh, someone else thinks he needs a cookie. So here is the platter for boot camp. It turned out really cute. I put the cupcakes that I made around the edges and then sugar cookies in the middle. Thank you for joining me for today's holiday baking video. I hope you enjoyed seeing my famous frosted sugar cookies. This recipe will be on my website along with all of the modifications that I shared with you in today's video on how you can make these a little bit more calorie-friendly, point-friendly. There's some really simple modifications you can make if you want to save points and calories. Don't forget to check out the description box down below for nutrition coaching, links and discounts to my favorite things and come join our Facebook group. We would love to have you. Merry Christmas, friends. I hope you have an amazing Sunday and I'll see you in the next one. Bye. 🎵 Jingle bells ring 🎵