 Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and I'm on the WWW, aka Weight Watchers Blue Plan. Today I have a super fun, highly requested vlogmas video. Every year for my family, I make sugar cookies. Literally everybody I know that has ever tried them asks for them every single year. It is the star of the show during the holiday season. So this year I decided to share how I make my sugar cookies with you. You may be pleasantly surprised how easy they are, especially the frosting. That's a question. A comment that I get a lot is I am terrible at making frosting. So I'm really excited to share with you my easy, peasy frosted sugar cookies. And like I said, they're a family favorite. Literally every person that's ever tasted them say that they are the best cookies they've ever had. Now to forewarn you, they are not WW friendly. We are using real sugar, real frosting, real ingredients. However, on my recipe website, I will add some modifications you can make if you want to make them a little more WW friendly. So if you're interested in the original recipe or the WW recipe, it will be on my website, which is linked down in the description box. Also in the description box, you will find my nutrition coaching website. I do offer personalized macro and calorie calculation. Super important moving into 2021. Get yourself set up for success. I also have 30 and 60 minute coaching sessions. So check out my nutrition coaching website as well. Links, discount codes to some of the products I shared today and all my favorite things are also in the description as well as my Facebook group. Head on over and join us there. We'd love to have you. There's some fun things starting the first of the year. So make sure you join the Facebook group. Also give this video a thumbs up if you're excited for a new delicious sugar cookie recipe. And if you're not yet subscribed, please take a moment and do so. I'd love to have you join my community of 30,000 subscribers or close and growing. So head on over and join us here on YouTube. So we have some cookies to make to cut out to frost and they're incredible. So let's jump in to make these famous soft sugar cookies. It's actually really simple. There's not a lot of ingredients. The original recipe will have a frosting addition as well. I'll put that on my website. But I actually use kind of a secret method for my frosting, which I'll share with you guys as well. But this is what you're going to need for the actual sugar cookie flour and of course, sugar, baking powder and salt, vanilla extract and almond extract. I'm just using vanilla bean paste just because it adds that little extra element to the cookies. And then you're going to need butter salted or unsalted. If you use salted, just use less salt. If you use unsalted, use the recommended amount of salt and then of course eggs. So let's get started. So the very first thing we're going to do is our dry ingredients. So I decided to double the recipe just because I want to make sure I have enough cookies. I'm telling you, you guys, these are huge family favorites. So make sure that you're making enough for your entire family. So I doubled the recipe. It was two and three quarters cup flour in the original. So doubling that makes that five and a half cups of flour. So there's four and one and a half cups in this bowl here makes five and a half. The original recipe calls for one teaspoon of baking powder. So I'm actually going to add two teaspoons. And the original recipe again is half of a teaspoon of salt. That is about all I'm going to put in because I'm actually using, as you know, salted butter. So then I'm just going to stir this together until combined. We are breaking out the big guns with my stand mixer. I literally use it once a year for Christmas cookies. So in my mixing bowl, I have one and a half cups of softened butter room temperature. I popped mine in the microwave for just a couple of seconds. It was still a bit hard. And then to that, I'm going to add my two cups of sugar. So I went ahead and added the bowl to my stand mixer. I'm going to turn it on kind of a lower speed. And I'm going to allow the butter and the sugar to cream together. I'm then going to add my eggs one at a time into the mix. Let that just mix until the eggs are incorporated. Once the eggs are mixed in, I'm going to add about two teaspoons of vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste, whatever it is that you are using. And then for the almond extract, I wanted a much subtler flavor. So I'm only going to add in about a half of a teaspoon total rather than an entire teaspoon, which is what is doubling the recipe. Turn your mixer back on and allow that to become incorporated. This is where the magic happens. We are going to add in our flour little by little. So what I generally do is just use a one cup measuring cup and I'll add about one and a half to two cups in, turn on my mixer, let that start to combine and continue and repeat until you have a dough. So here is our dough. Now, this recipe does not require the dough to be chilled. However, pro tip, chill your dough at least for a couple hours. It makes it much easier to work with. So I'm actually going to cover this with some saran wrap and throw this in the fridge for two to four hours. Three hours later, I just pulled the dough out of the refrigerator. It looks really good. It's nice and cold. So I'm going to go ahead and pull it out of my pan here and get it ready to roll out what I'm using is a silicone mat. This is just a cutting mat. You'll also need a rolling pin, of course, and some flour in case you need to flour the surface and flour the rolling pin. So I want to add a little flour to my rolling pin. And then I'm just going to roll my dough out to the thickness that I want. Now, one of the tricks to my cookies is that the dough is rolled out fairly thick. I like my cookies to be thicker. I find that they come out a lot softer and they're just a little bit more tender and delicious. So I'm going to roll my dough out pretty darn thick. Now that my dough is rolled out, I have my cookie cutter. So I put these up this year at Target. I did show these in a grocery haul. They were a dollar a piece, which is great price. So I went ahead and added a little flour to my cookie cutter. And then I'm just going to cut shapes and repeat. I'll just continue to roll out the dough as much as I can until I need to pick up a little bit more dough and we'll get these cut into shapes and get these on a cookie sheets. Once I have them cut out, I just pop the cutter off and pull up the cookie. And I want to show you how thick these are for reference. So that's how thick I like to make my cookies. Again, I find that they just turn out a lot better. So I'm just going to put them on the wire rack here on my baking sheet and fill it up. My oven is currently preheating to three hundred and seventy five degrees when you do space your cookies out on your baking sheet. Make sure that you leave a little bit of room in between because they do grow and expand as they cook. Don't these look so good? You guys, they're nice and thick. By the way, always taste your dough and the dough is phenomenal. If the dough tastes good, the cookies are going to be good. So we are actually going to put these into the oven at three hundred and seventy five degrees until they're cooked through. We barely, barely want them browned on the bottom. Trade number two is ready to go into the oven as soon as that batch comes out. I'm actually really happy I doubled the recipe because this is all the dough I have left, which isn't a lot because again, the cookies are thick. The cookie cutters are bigger. So if you want a decent amount of cookies more than a couple dozen, definitely, definitely double the batch. The first batch of cookies is out. You can see that it's barely browned on the edge. They may even seem a bit under baked, but they'll sit here for a couple of minutes and then I transfer them immediately to wire racks for cooling. So I'm done. I've used up all the dough. I threw away about the size of a quarter, not enough for another cookie. So I have this pan and this pan, the one that is in the oven and then our first set of cookies. So like I said, it doesn't make a lot if they're thicker. But as soon as the second batch comes out, we'll pop in this pan and this pan and our cookies will be baked batch number two. I'm going to finish the last couple of pans and then I'll show you how many cookies I got out of the batch and we'll put these in storage overnight and we'll be back tomorrow to frost them. So here are our cookies. I'm so excited about these, you guys. They are really delicious as always. My mom actually texted me today and asked if I've made my sugar cookies. That's how excited she is. I'm so incredibly excited to share this recipe with you so that you can recreate it for your family. So what we're going to do is I'm going to put a lid on this. I do have like a plastic lid for it. I'm just going to set it aside until tomorrow. That way they have a chance to completely cool. Tomorrow we'll whip up our frosting, frost and decorate them, and then we'll be able to see exactly what these gorgeous sugar cookies look like. So let's talk about the cookie situation. So we made the cookies today and we have them cooling. And how many cookies did you eat before we got a chance to frost them? I had two. Then you know. The next day. All right, it's the next day and it's time to do the fun, stressful and longest part of making sugar cookies. And that is frosting them up. So here are our cookies minus the two Troy eight. And here's my little assortment for decorating the cookies. So first, let's start with frosting. So I told you guys that I was going to give you kind of a pro tip. My secret to my sugar cookies being so good is this frosting. The Betty Crocker rich and creamy in vanilla and the bread Betty Crocker rich and creamy and cream cheese. What I do is I mix half vanilla and half cream cheese together and that's my frosting and it is so good. There's just something about that combination with these cookies. So the pro tip isn't really a pro tip. It's kind of an easy tip. It saves you from having to make frosting, figuring out the consistency of the flavor. And I'm telling you it's a game changer with these cookies. And then I frost them and I decorate them. So I have these holiday sprinkles. They're just mini bits of candy canes. And then I always buy just a variety pack from Walmart, just different shapes of sprinkles. And then I have these leftover from last year. They're a little Christmas tree like candies. I like the traditional colors of Christmas in my cookies. So when I do use the food coloring, I generally only make red and green frosting. Now you could do whatever you want, but I generally stick with the traditional Christmas colors in the frosting and the decor. So let's make up the frosting and then let's decorate these beautiful cookies. So I pulled out two just good sized bowls, opened up both of my frostings. And all I'm going to do is put half of the vanilla frosting in one bowl, half in the other and do the same thing with the cream cheese frosting. And then we'll stir it up together before we add in the food coloring. So I'm just going to stir the vanilla and the cream cheese frosting together. And then we'll stir it even more when we add in the food coloring. So if you do decide to make more colors than just the two, you would just divide your frosting into the appropriate number of bowls. Now for the food coloring. So first I have the green food coloring and you can do as much or as little as you want. I want a dark green, like a traditional Christmas green. So you could do lighter or darker, just whatever color you're going for with your frosting. So I've got it green, but not as green as I want, adding in my food coloring again, until it's that dark, rich Christmas green. This is perfect. This is the perfect green. So now we're going to mix up the red and do that the same way. You generally need quite a bit of red to really get red, because otherwise it comes out pink and we have red frosting. So here are our two colors. I'm going to set up my cookie decorating station and let's decorate these cookies. Cookie decoration station is ready. We've got our cookies. We have our frostings. I have a container here that I put my frosted cookies in and I kind of have a system. So I'll layer the bottom layer with the frosted cookies, pop it into the fridge or the freezer while I'm frosting the next layer of cookies. That way the frosting can harden a little bit before I add another layer. I do also put saran wrap. You can see here that I have saran wrap on my table to prevent a big mess. And I do put a layer of saran wrap like I did here between the layers of cookies. I have my candy canes, my sprinkles, my cute little ornaments. I have both a spoon and a knife in my frosting. So whatever I need, I have my bottle of water and I am ready, my friends, to start frosting these cookies. Let's start with the good old fashioned Christmas tree. And of course, in my opinion, this needs to be green. So I'll go ahead and just take my knife and just spread the frosting out evenly over the tree. I like a pretty heavy hand of frosting only because the cookie is so thick and the cookie is sweet, but it's not where all the sweetness comes from. That comes more from the frosting. So I do like to put a pretty good thick layer of frosting on a cookie. There's my tree. And now let's decorate it. And I think since we did the tree, it seems fitting to use the bulbs. Oh, and I also have a paper towel here to wipe my hands off. So I'm not licking all the frosting all the time. So I'm just going to pop on a few of these Christmas tree bulbs. And again, you can add whatever decorations you want, whatever you think would be cute for what you're going for with your cookies. But I like to keep again, just those traditional Christmas colors in my cookie. So a few of these cute little Christmas bulbs. And then I think just for fun, we've got some red kind of sanding sugar here. I think I'm going to pop just a little bit of that on there as well. This saran wrap underneath the cookie is going to make cleanup a lot easier. We'll just roll it right up. You could use parchment paper, paper towels, kind of whatever you wanted. But it makes sense for me to just go ahead and put down some saran wrap. So cookie number one. And then again, I'll just pop that here in the container until I have the bottom layer filled and then we'll put it in the fridge or freezer to cool between cookies. So we have a pile of cookies to decorate. So look at these. Here's our first little layer of cookies. Aren't these just absolutely adorable? So I'm going to pop these in the fridge. I have several of these containers, so I'm going to grab a new one and we'll frost another half dozen cookies or so while these are cooling in the fridge. Here are the cookies. I've got a couple layers in each container. I do that just so there's not too much weight between the layers of cookies. I actually end up storing these in the refrigerator or freezer. If you're pretty far out from Christmas, definitely just pop them in the freezer. We're just literally about four days out. So I'm going to just throw these in the refrigerator. They turned out great. And look at this, not too much of a mess. I do have green frosting and red frosting left. So I'll just go ahead and throw that away. Some sprinkles left for next year, but it was a huge success. You guys, I'm going to taste test one. Let you know what I think. Delicious, delicious as I remember. Thank you so much for joining me on today's vlogmas video. I hope that you are excited to take this cookie recipe and run with it and make these for your family. I promise you you will be getting rave reviews and you definitely need to let me know how it goes if you recreate these cookies. Again, the recipe, including WW adjustments, will be on my website. My website is down in the description box with my nutrition coaching website. Links and discount codes to my favorite things and my Facebook group. So definitely head down to that description box. If you enjoyed today's recipe, please again, give it a thumbs up. It helps me out and lets me know that these are the types of videos I should bring out for you guys during vlogmas and into the new year. Also, if you're not yet subscribed, I would love it if you would take a moment and subscribe and join my community here on YouTube. We would love to have you. So Merry Christmas, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this recipe. Happy vlogmas and I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.