Soft Sugar Cookies are are easy to make from common ingredients in the kitchen. And it only takes 20 minutes!
Soft sugar cookies are wonderfully soft and delicious sugar cookies that taste somewhere between a sugar cookie and a shortbread cookie. They are quick to make and this recipe can provide quite a lot of cookies depending on the size. I also wanted to use this chance to show off my newly found D20 cookie cutter! Find more cookie recipes in the cookie repository of the sweet study!
Soft sugar cookies are made with ingredients found in almost any kitchen and do not require a lot of technical skills!
Check out the Make section of MCG for more fun recipes like desserts and savory dishes.
Ingredients
The first step is to gather all of the ingredients. I like to keep my large consumption ingredients in reusable cereal containers. And I use my stand mixer to make dough. You can easily make this recipe by hand. Or by using a hand mixer.
Sugar cookies don’t require many special ingredients. Just the classics – butter, flour, sugar, eggs, salt, and vanilla extract. This recipe does use corn starch but it is not a requirement.
I like using unsalted butter because it allows me to control the salt that I put in recipes. Too much salt is no bueno.
Process
Making the dough
This recipe calls for the creaming method of putting the butter and sugar together. The butter and sugar should be fully incorporated before moving onto the next step. The texture of this mixture should not be grainy.
Once the two ingredients are creamed together, the eggs are added to the mixture. This makes the dough into a paste like texture that I am not a fan of.
That’s why we’re not done! It’s time to add in the dry ingredients.
The dry ingredients should be sifted and whisked together in a separate bowl before being added into the main mixture.
Then, it’s time to add the dry ingredients into the butter mixture. The mixture will have a sandy texture at the beginning.
As the mixer keeps working, the mixture will come together into a dough. If you don’t have a mixer, then you will have to knead the dough by hand to bring it together.
The dough turned out very stiff. It is a very pliable dough almost like playdough. Definitely more suited to kneading than whisking.
Shaping and baking
After making the dough, roll the dough into a ball and flatten it by hand. I put the dough between two pieces of parchment paper and rolled it out.
The flattened dough should measure about 1/3rd inch thickness. I found this is the perfect thickness for a larger size cookie.
The cookies that I cut out are around about 3 inches wide. I used a D20 cookie cutter that I found on amazon – the link is here.
The cookies then went into an oven pre-heated 375 degrees Fahrenheit for about 10 minutes. The cookies didn’t gain much color as they cooked but they do lose their sheen.
Let them cool before you enjoy them!
These cookies can definitely be frozen when in the dough stage. I would recommend freezing them in their final shape.
And that’s all you need to do to make a soft sugar cookie!
Soft Sugar Cookie
Ingredients
- 1 Cup Unsalted Butter
- 1 Cup Granulated Sugar
- 2 Large Eggs
- 4 Cups All-Purpose Flour
- 3/4 Cup Cornstartch
- 1 Tsp salt
- 1 1/2 Tsp Vanilla Extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit
- Using a mixer paddle, cream together butter and sugar until combined
- Mix the eggs into the butter/sugar mixture
- In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, cornstarch, and salt until combined
- Mix the flour mixture into the liquid mixture, let the mixer continue for about 5 minutes or until the dough gathers into a ball that pulls away from the bowl
- Mix in Vanilla
- Roll out dough between two sheets of parchment until about 1/3 inch thickness
- Cut into shapes and bake for approximately 10 minutes**
Notes
- When adding the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, the mixture will seem a little sandy at first but it will come together
- These cookies will fully bake without having too much color on them
- Smaller cookies will finish cooking faster, the 10 minutes works well for the large cookies that were made from this recipe
Do you have a recommended icing for decorating cookies?
I typically like doing a royal icing with sugar cookies: https://makecraftgame.com/2021/10/18/royal-icing/
Or, if you want a icing that doesn’t have egg whites, try out the icing from this recipe: https://makecraftgame.com/2023/04/24/gbbo13-wk2-showstopper/#Recipe