Shaping the Dough for Sugar Cookies

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I am going to show you how to make sugar cookies. So going to sprinkle a little flour on here, smooth it all out and I am going to finish by hand. Also, something important is to make sure your hands are clean and remove any jewelry because it will get really gooey. So we are going to just scrape all of our cookie dough right out onto the cutting board and I always use wood cutting boards because wood cutting boards will pull the excess moisture out with whatever you are working with. Especially important if you are doing bread because if you use like a resin or plastic cutting board something non-porous, what happens is the water or moisture whatever you are working with just sticks right on the outside of it. Grab a spatula real quick so that I can finish scraping every last bit of wonderful cookie dough goodness off of this. I'll see when I get all the stuff out of the ball because that is probably another whole cookie in the bowl right there; maybe two. Now the fun part, get your hands all floury and start mushing it. Who says you can't have fun making cookies. All you do is just take your cookie dough and pour your flour into it and just squeeze it like that, just like making bread. The good thing about this is you won't get any lumps also. And once again, if you are using an electric mixer, you won't have to worry about this. You can just throw it all in there and let it go. One thing you want to be concerned about though is the temperature of the room you are doing it in and also how hot your hands are. Because if you don't move fast enough or if it is too hot where you are at, it will start melting. The butter starts melting in your hands and you get a big cookie mess. You can also use your dough to pick up any flour that kind of runs away from you and you can also use your dough to pick up other pieces of dough. So form this back into one giant ball of dough. Flip it over and make sure you got all the flour off the bottom. It looks like I did. "