Lately, visions of sugar plums don't dance in my head (not that they did before) - it's cookies dancing instead. All kinds of cookies. Spicy ones, chocolatey ones, pretty ones, difficult ones, easy ones...all whirring together in a dance before being drowned in a glass of milk.
Sorry for the violent imagery. I'm a little tired this morning.
Yesterday I cranked out several similar doughs one after the other. First, there was the dough for Bill's Mom's German Butter Cookies. Then the TWD sugar cookie dough, and then the dough for Farmer Hats. I'll be baking the Butter cookies and the Farmer Hats at some point today, but I baked off this week's Dorie selection yesterday because A) it was quick and easy to do and B) I was already late with the post and wanted to catch up.
Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies, chosen by Ulrike from Küchenlatein, is a simple, tasty, homey cookie that lends itself to all sorts of creative modifications and at the same time is perfectly lovely on its own. You can find the recipe on Ulrike's site, or you can flip to pages 146-147 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours and read it there.
The ingredients are basic - butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking powder, and salt. The dough is soft and definitely requires refrigeration for a couple of hours before rolling out and baking.
Another option, one that Dorie suggests as an alternative to rolled-out cookies, is the slice-and-bake form, in which you just roll the dough into a log, chill it well, and, when you're ready to bake cookies, just unwrap, slice, and bake. You can also roll and wrap the dough and freeze it for some other time. And you don't have to bake off the whole log - just slice off a few cookies and bake them. So accommodating, these cookies!
Anyway, since I've already got so many roll-and-cut cookies in my schedule right now, I took the easy way and rolled this dough into two logs, wrapped them in parchment, and stuck them in the fridge for a while.
When the time came to bake them, I wanted to do something festive with them, so I rolled one in little red, white and green jimmies and rolled the other in white sparkling sugar.
Then it was just the matter of slicing them into rounds about a quarter of an inch thick, laying them on a cookie sheet, and baking.
(I sprinkled the remaining jimmies on top of the cookies. One can never have too many jimmies.)
And there we are - lovely little sugar cookies, fragrant with vanilla, that smell and taste of home.
Perfect for gobbling up with milk or tea...and nice to share, as well....
Of course, we'll have to make more of them for Santa. This current batch will never last another two weeks.
If you haven't already done so, go here to see what the other TWD bakers did with this recipe!
