Sugar Cookies From Scratch

This was the first time I’ve made sugar cookies from scratch; I usually buy pre-made dough at the grocery store. But this particular project called for that little something extra special…and I already had all the ingredients and didn’t really feel like running out to the store.

One of my friends recently bought Pioneer Woman's cookbook and tried out her sugar cookie recipe and said it was delicious. So, I was going to use Pioneer Woman’s recipe until I read through it and saw the warning at the end stating they were very crumbly and not intended to travel…that just wasn’t going to work this time, you’ll understand later.

So I decided to use the Wilton Roll-Out Cookie Recipe from the Wilton Cookie Exchange book. After all, a cookie exchange implies some level of travel. The recipe is also on their website: http://www.wilton.com/recipe/Roll-Out-Cookie-Recipe

I found it odd that the recipe only called for one egg…I also found it odd that the dough was so incredibly crumbly. As I was mixing the ingredients I realized it wasn’t really coming together… I’m used to cookie doughs (mostly oatmeal raisen, oatmeal white chocolate cranberry, and chocolate cookies) where the dough blends together into one large gooey blob. I contemplated adding another egg, but I decided to trust the recipe and make the most of it.

Is sugar cookie dough supposed to be crumbly? If anyone knows, please let me know, because I found it very weird.

I tried to knead all the crumbles together into a disk, so that I could roll the dough out…it mostly worked. Rolling the dough would make the edges start to crack and crumble so I could only get a few cookies out of the center of the dough from each roll. Eventually I got all the cookies cut out.

This particular recipe said not to refrigerate the dough…also something I found a little different. After baking, some cookies held their shape perfectly, some expanded and had some texture on top. Since all the dough was room temperature, I’m assuming it must have been the thickness of the cookies that determined the baking outcome.

Note all the different sizes, that was not on purpose.

All in all, they turned out well and they taste wonderful (I had a scrap cookie that I used as a taste test)!