unfussy sugar cookies

Last month, after 13 years of stubbornness, I shared a roast turkey recipe and then a funny thing happened — many of you made and loved the turkey and your turkeys looked so beautiful (yes, turkeys!beautiful!) the warmth beamed off them and onto to me and left me inspired to shake loose another recipe I’ve been promising you for almost as long: Sugar cookies. Or butter cookies. Or roll-out cookies. Or holiday cookies. NEW: Watch me make these cookies on YouTube! It’s just, they can be kind of boring! And a lot of work. So many of the intricate, stunning ones that I admire with awe fall short on taste. And personally I just cannot with hours upon hours of work for someone to inhale my masterpiece in one bite, spilling crumbs on the floor, and then immediately ask for another, rude as it may be to come for my kids so publicly. I knew I’d never be able to share a sugar cookie recipe until I could find a way to make them as unfussy as I want them to be, the kind of thing you could decide to make, say, right now, and be eating not very long from now, decorated to the hilt. That brings us to today.There are five really cool things about this recipe (and if you’re familiar withthis post, a few are paraphrased from it):1. No softened butter.I began making cookies with cold butter in a food processor or stand mixer (or, with patience, ahand mixer) a few years ago and haven’t looked back since. What I found was that there was no discernable decline in the final quality of the vast majority of cookies made this way, but a steep incline in my enjoyment of the process, now that I didn’t have to add 30 to 60 minutes to my prep time to get the butter exactly soft enough whoops too soft, back to the fridge, yup, now it’s hard again, repeat until you can no longer remember why you even wanted to make cookies.2. No multi-hour chill in the fridge.Instead of fighting a firm, cold dough into a flat sheet, I instead roll my cookies out when it’s the easiest — right away. I then slide the flattened dough onto a baking sheet or thin cutting board and pop it in the freezer for 10 to 20 minutes (vs. 4 hours or overnight in the fridge), until it’s completely solid, then cut the cookies in wonderfully crisp shapes from it. You can put your cookies in the oven within 30 minutes of starting the dough.3. No flour to roll it out.I roll my cookie dough between two sheets of parchment paper with absolutely no extra flour. Having no powdery mess to clean up is downright revolutionary in my kitchen and all of the rooms floury feet might drag the spillover mess into. Plus, flouring can toughen up the dough as it absorbs extra, and leads to annoying notes in recipes like “don’t reroll scraps.” I mean, what? You can reroll your scraps with abandon here.4. No cookie cutters.Or, you know, have no scraps. I have about 100 more cookie cutters than any human being needs (although most are crusted with Play-Doh these days). But nothing gives me the joy that using a smooth or fluted pastry wheel to cut an entire sheet of dough into squares, rectangles, diamonds, and other parallelograms for a tessellated slab of cookies with nothing left to re-chill and reroll. Yes, some that come from the edges are irregular; I find them charming. If you do not, you can use them for snacks, or decorating practice.5. No piping bags, food dye, and while we’re at it, no tweezers.Okay, I cheated because I bought a rollof thesein 2015 and will never use them up, but my goal here was a decorated sugar cookie that required no paintbrushes or piping tips. Dipping cookies in a thinned royal icing gives you an evenly frosted cookie that you can finish with sprinkles, or, once it sets, add a thicker icing from a sandwich bag with the corner snipped off in any kind of doodles. Keeping it all white allows you to skip mixing batches of frosting with food dye and, bonus, evokes the sparkly winter wonderland that NYC is too rarely for my tastes. I used two kinds of sprinkles here (I’ll link to options at the end), pinched them on messily and inconsistently and I’m absolutely at peace with the results.I hope you find all of these shortcuts deliciously lazy, maybe a little bit triumphant, and, at least in my case, a bit miraculous in that this level of cookie ease has turned me into a person who will willingly make sugar cookies going forward. I can’t wait to see what you do with these.PreviouslySix months ago:Burrata with Charred and Raw Sugar Snap PeasOne year ago:FalafelTwo years ago:Dutch Apple PieThree years ago:Union Square Cafe’s Bar NutsFour years ago:Pull-Apart RugelachandTres Leches Cake + A Taco PartyFive years ago:Decadent Hot Chocolate MixandGingrebread BiscottiSix years ago:Eggnog FlorentinesSeven years ago:Cashew Butter BallsEight years ago:Caesar Salad Deviled EggsNine years ago:Garlic Butter Roasted MushroomsTen years ago:Coffee ToffeeEleven years ago:Zuni Cafe’s Roast Chicken + Bread SaladTwelve years ago:Chicken and DumplingsThirteen years ago:Pecan Squares It’s just, they can be kind of boring! And a lot of work. So many of the intricate, stunning ones that I admire with awe fall short on taste. And personally I just cannot with hours upon hours of work for someone to inhale my masterpiece in one bite, spilling crumbs on the floor, and then immediately ask for another, rude as it may be to come for my kids so publicly. I knew I’d never be able to share a sugar cookie recipe until I could find a way to make them as unfussy as I want them to be, the kind of thing you could decide to make, say, right now, and be eating not very long from now, decorated to the hilt. That brings us to today. There are five really cool things about this recipe (and if you’re familiar withthis post, a few are paraphrased from it): 1. No softened butter.I began making cookies with cold butter in a food processor or stand mixer (or, with patience, ahand mixer) a few years ago and haven’t looked back since. What I found was that there was no discernable decline in the final quality of the vast majority of cookies made this way, but a steep incline in my enjoyment of the process, now that I didn’t have to add 30 to 60 minutes to my prep time to get the butter exactly soft enough whoops too soft, back to the fridge, yup, now it’s hard again, repeat until you can no longer remember why you even wanted to make cookies. 2. No multi-hour chill in the fridge.Instead of fighting a firm, cold dough into a flat sheet, I instead roll my cookies out when it’s the easiest — right away. I then slide the flattened dough onto a baking sheet or thin cutting board and pop it in the freezer for 10 to 20 minutes (vs. 4 hours or overnight in the fridge), until it’s completely solid, then cut the cookies in wonderfully crisp shapes from it. You can put your cookies in the oven within 30 minutes of starting the dough. 3. No flour to roll it out.I roll my cookie dough between two sheets of parchment paper with absolutely no extra flour. Having no powdery mess to clean up is downright revolutionary in my kitchen and all of the rooms floury feet might drag the spillover mess into. Plus, flouring can toughen up the dough as it absorbs extra, and leads to annoying notes in recipes like “don’t reroll scraps.” I mean, what? You can reroll your scraps with abandon here. 4. No cookie cutters.Or, you know, have no scraps. I have about 100 more cookie cutters than any human being needs (although most are crusted with Play-Doh these days). But nothing gives me the joy that using a smooth or fluted pastry wheel to cut an entire sheet of dough into squares, rectangles, diamonds, and other parallelograms for a tessellated slab of cookies with nothing left to re-chill and reroll. Yes, some that come from the edges are irregular; I find them charming. If you do not, you can use them for snacks, or decorating practice. 5. No piping bags, food dye, and while we’re at it, no tweezers.Okay, I cheated because I bought a rollof thesein 2015 and will never use them up, but my goal here was a decorated sugar cookie that required no paintbrushes or piping tips. Dipping cookies in a thinned royal icing gives you an evenly frosted cookie that you can finish with sprinkles, or, once it sets, add a thicker icing from a sandwich bag with the corner snipped off in any kind of doodles. Keeping it all white allows you to skip mixing batches of frosting with food dye and, bonus, evokes the sparkly winter wonderland that NYC is too rarely for my tastes. I used two kinds of sprinkles here (I’ll link to options at the end), pinched them on messily and inconsistently and I’m absolutely at peace with the results. I hope you find all of these shortcuts deliciously lazy, maybe a little bit triumphant, and, at least in my case, a bit miraculous in that this level of cookie ease has turned me into a person who will willingly make sugar cookies going forward. I can’t wait to see what you do with these. Six months ago:Burrata with Charred and Raw Sugar Snap PeasOne year ago:FalafelTwo years ago:Dutch Apple PieThree years ago:Union Square Cafe’s Bar NutsFour years ago:Pull-Apart RugelachandTres Leches Cake + A Taco PartyFive years ago:Decadent Hot Chocolate MixandGingrebread BiscottiSix years ago:Eggnog FlorentinesSeven years ago:Cashew Butter BallsEight years ago:Caesar Salad Deviled EggsNine years ago:Garlic Butter Roasted MushroomsTen years ago:Coffee ToffeeEleven years ago:Zuni Cafe’s Roast Chicken + Bread SaladTwelve years ago:Chicken and DumplingsThirteen years ago:Pecan Squares