Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Martha's Sugar Cookies

In the small cookbook cupboard of Pink House, we have quite the cookie cookbook by Martha Stewart. It has lovely pictures of all the cookies for the table of contents as well as spread throughout the book with the recipes. My roommates have made a few of them before, but this was my first experience with Martha. I really love plain sugar cookies and have been hankering to make them for a week or so now. I kept planning on baking them this weekend, but I was so busy doing things like playing Settlers and going out to eat and watching tv that I didn't get around to it.

But last night, as I was going to sleep, I had visions of white, pink, and red sugar cookies dancing through my head and I knew that it would be my Valentine's day gift to my roommates at Pink House. Also, I love playing with food coloring. When I was a kid, I used to make pancakes on the weekends with my parents, and I would always make them weird colors. My mom would try to convince me not to and remind me that green pancakes weren't necessarily appetizing, but I was enamored. I also used to mix my Blue Bell Ice Cream (the best in the world, to my well-sample tongue) until it turned to liquid and then stir in food coloring. So this multi red hued experience was a good Valentine's Day gift for myself as well.




Old Fashioned Sugar Cookies

3 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1 tbsp grated lemon zest
1 cup / 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
2 large eggs
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sift or whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt.

In another bowl, put in both sugars and zest. Mix with an electric mixer on medium for 30 seconds. Then mix in butter until pale and fluffy, about 1 minute. Mix in eggs one at a time, and then the lemon juice. Reduce speed to low and gradually mix in the flour mixture.

Drop dough onto parchment paper with a 2-inch ice cream scoop (I use tbsp spoons) about 3 inches apart. Flatten slightly. Bake for 15 minutes until golden. Cool on wire rack.

Martha advises sprinkling with sanding sugar, but I just let mine be as is. I also separated the batch into 4 different smaller balls and mixed in varying amount of red food coloring with each. 

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