Quick and Easy Sugar Cookies

Hi, I'm Heather Bertinetti for eHow.com, and today I'm going to show you how to make sugar cookies. First I have my butter that's slightly softened. I'm going to put it in my KitchenAid stand mixer here, just drop that in. Next we're going to add our sugar. So now that our sugar is added, we're going to put in our paddle attachment on our stand mixer and we're going to do what's called creaming method here and on the lowest speed, cream the sugar and the butter together. So while that's creaming I have my eggs and my vanilla. Once this gets fully incorporated and light and fluffy you can kick it up a notch to get there. So now that our butter is fully creamed, it's time to add the eggs, slowly one at a time, add the egg until it's incorporated, great. Next we're going to add our vanilla extract. Now it's time to add the dry ingredients, so slowly add the flour and now at this point I'm going to kick it down a little bit too, so I don't get flour all over the place, and that's all in, my salt, followed by my baking powder. Now you just want to mix this until it comes together as a firm dough. So we're going to turn our mixer off because our dough is ready, make sure to scrape all the dough off the paddle and now we're going to wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and chill it, preferably overnight. You can also freeze the dough if you'd like or just three to four hours at least, pat it down into discs. It will just make rolling out later easier. So that's it. I'm going to pop this in the fridge for a few hours and then we're going to come back and roll it out for our cookies. So now I've taken my sugar cookie out of the fridge and I'm going to show you how to roll it out. So we're going to release it from the plastic and using quite a bit of flour because this is sort of a sticky dough here, we're going to pat it down, just to thin it out a little bit, a little bit more flour on the top and start from the center and work your way out. If it starts to stick on the rolling pin, just grab some flour and flour the rolling pin, a little more on top and now when we're rolling these cookies, everybody always asks me, well how thick do I roll them out to. Well, here's the trick. If your cookie has baking powder in it, which it does, that's a chemical leavener so they are going to puff up and they're going to bake higher than what you cut them out as right? So we're going to go about a quarter of an inch thick here. So a quick tip because doughs are really sticky when you cut out, is I always keep a bowl or a plate of flour, I'm going to dip my cutter into the flour to prevent it from sticking and it will easily release. I'm just going to cut this whole thing here. So now that our cookies are finished being cut, and they're placed on the pan, we're going to bake these at 350 degrees for about eight to nine minutes. So now that our cookies are out of the oven and they're completely cooled, we can get to the fun part, the icing. So I have some royal icing that I've made before. I'm just using a regular knife, no need for any fancy tools, I'm just going to put some white icing on these cookies and spread it all the way around to the outer edge of the cookie. Now remember if you're doing cutouts which is a certain shape and you have all different colored icings that you've made, you should really let each color dry on the cookie before you add another one, just to prevent it from bleeding into one another. Just clean up my edge, great. And now we can pipe some cool designs if you'd like. We have some green here, the holidays are coming so we'll do a little tree and we'll start from the top and go down. This is just using a straight tip and you have a little Christmas tree. Really the sky is the limit. Get creative, have fun with it guys. I'm Heather Bertinetti. Catch me again on eHow.com.