Host the Perfect Holiday Playdate and Make the Easiest Cutout Sugar Cookie Recipe Ever (2024)

FAQs

How do you use store bought sugar cookie dough for cutouts? ›

Roll dough to 1/4-inch thickness on work surface. Cut out desired shapes using floured 2- to 2 1/2-inch cookie cutter. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 8 to 11 minutes or until edges are light golden brown.

My favorite way to decorate sugar cookies—especially for holidays and special occasions—is by using royal icing. The secret to getting precise lines, dots, and other details with royal icing is using a squeeze bottle.

Use powdered sugar instead of flour to roll your dough: if you're like me and use every bit of your dough, I recommend using powdered sugar instead of flour to roll your dough. When I use flour it adds too much flour to the dough and makes it drier.

Most recipes suggest rolling the dough to ¼-inch thick because it's easy to work with (less breakage) and achieves a soft, tender cookie. Roll out a portion of dough at a time and keep the remaining dough in the refrigerator.

As a general rule of thumb, you should refrigerate cookie dough for at least 30 minutes and up to 24 hours. More than that, and you won't see a noticeable difference in the final product. Once the dough has chilled, let it warm up at room temperature until it's just pliable (about 5 to 10 minutes).

Chilling the dough is a key step in making sugar cookies, especially when you're making cut-outs. Even if you're tight on time, make sure to get the dough in the fridge, or even the freezer, even if it's only for a little while. Skip this step, and the dough will be sticky, and much harder to work with.

Plus, your well-chilled cookies are less likely to spread in the oven while they bake.

OverCreaming Butter & Sugar

Y'all are creaming that butter/sugar for FAR too long for cutout cookies. Try creaming your butter for 2 minutes or just until the sides of the mixing bowl are painted with the mixture. That is as long as you need to cream for. Excessive creaming will absolutely lead to cookie spread.

Why won't my cut-out cookies hold their shape? ›

Crank up the oven temperature: Finally, you may notice that I recommend baking the cookies at a higher temperature for a shorter time. This allows the cookie to “set up” more quickly and hold its shape during baking, making it less melty-slidey.

You can also try adding sprinkles to your cookies before baking, but depending on the recipe, they may melt in the oven. Try it out with one cookie before committing to an entire batch.

How to Decorate Sugar Cookies. The main thing to remember is to let the cookies cool completely before applying cookie icing or frosting so the heat from the cookies doesn't melt it off.

But if you roll cookie dough between two sheets of parchment paper, it means that you can eliminate the flour mess, as well as neatly transfer the cut-out cookies on the parchment to a sheet pan. Here's how it works.

Silicone creates the ideal amount of surface tension to turn rough balls of dough into smooth dinner rolls (or pre-bagels).

Cookie tops - the ones baked on a Silpat have a much nicer appearance. The ones baked on parchment are lumpy and seem to have developed a few air holes that broke through the surface. Cookie bottoms - again, the ones baked on a Silpat look so much better.

For fool-proof, thick cut out sugar cookies, I highly recommend using a rolling pin with thickness guides and setting it to a ⅜" or ½" thickness. This is the thickness I have found results in the softest sugar cookies. The rolling pin I use only goes up to ⅜", so that's the thickness I use most frequently.