Simple Sugar Cookies

  While looking for recipes in the Taste of Home Baking Book, I ran across this recipe for simple sugar cookies. What caught my eye was the ingredient list. It is almost identical to my favorite rolled sugar cookie. Mary’s sugar cookie is one I use all the time for the holidays, but it is more work with the rolling and cutting out of the cookies.

  This called for forming them into a roll and chilling, slicing and then baking. Looked like it was worth a try. 

  Well,, they were very good, almost the same taste and much less work. They don’t look as pretty as the cutout cookies, but everyone voted yes for the taste and I vote yes for the amount of work in comparison to the rolled version. If you don’t like fussing with rolled cookies but do like sugar cookies, I would highly recommend these. 

 Like all cookies of this type, you could freeze the dough and just bake a few at a time. 

However the recipe only makes about 3 ½ dozen cookies and did not take long to bake. We will have them gone soon as I will share them with my taste testers.

Simple Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter, softened (I would recommend using butter not margarine)

1 ¼ cups confectioners’ sugar

1 egg 
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups all-purpose flour*

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

⅛ teaspoon salt

  In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla.

 Combine the flour, baking soda and salt. Add in two batches to the creamed butter mixture. Shape into two five inch rolls; wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour or until firm.

  Heat oven to 350°. Unwrap dough, returning what you are not going to cut right then to refrigerator. Cut into ¼ to ⅛ inch slices. Place 2 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets and bake at 350° for 8 to 10 minutes. These do spread so do not place too close. I sprinkled with sugar before baking.

*I did add about ⅛ cup more of flour to the cookies as I felt they were hard to roll up to chill. That seemed to work well.