Sugar Cookie Cutouts Recipe

Last week, I showed you the sugar cookies I made on Baking Day, but I wanted to be sure that I shared this fabulous recipe for sugar cookie dough with you. I consider it to be far superior to any other sugar cookie recipes I've tried throughout my lifetime. I know others agree with me as well, not only by their compliments, but by how quickly the cookies get gobbled up!

I do realize that Christmas is the ultimate sugar cookie-season, and that it has now passed, so I apologize for not sharing this recipe sooner. But at least I'm sharing it, and now you'll have it on hand for any sugar cookie-deserving occasion.

This recipe will result in thick, soft sugar cookies with an extra-special hint of flavor to them.

Here's the secret ingredient:

Almond paste! It looks like this in the can:

{The Ultimate} Sugar Cookie Cutouts

Ingredients:

4 large egg yolks

1/2 cup almond paste, broken into pieces

2 cups butter, softened and cut up

1 & 3/4 cups of sugar

1/2 tsp. salt

3 & 3/4 cups flour

Mix the egg yolks and almond paste at medium speed until crumbly. Add the butter, sugar, and salt; beat until creamy. Gradually mix in the flour.

Divide the dough into 4 equal pieces on a floured surface, then flatten each into a disk. Wrap each with plastic wrap and refrigerate 2 hours, or until dough is firm enough to roll.

Roll the dough 1/4 inch thick on a floured surface and cut out desired cookie shapes. Bake on a parchment-lined cookie sheet at 375 degrees for 10-12 minutes, until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack.

This recipe will yield 40-50 large cookie cutouts, or 50-65 smaller cookie cutouts.

***

I had originally intended on doing super-fancy icing on these cookies, but I realized too late that I was out of Wilton's Meringue Powder. It's a very complex icing strategy, including outlining the cookies with a stiff frosting from a pasty bag, then flooding the cookies, then decorating some more with pastry bags and tips, once the flooded icing has dried. The results are worth it, but it is ultra time-consuming.

With my lack of Meringue Powder, I turned to my good 'ole Better Homes and Gardens cookbook for Powdered Sugar Icing:

Powdered Sugar Icing

Ingredients:

1 cup sifted powdered sugar

1/4 tsp. vanilla

1 Tbsp. milk

In a small bowl, combine powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk. Stir in additional milk, 1 teaspoon at a time, until icing reaches drizzling consistency.

***

Since I had so many cookies to frost, including extra gingerbread men I made, I'm pretty sure I quadrupled this recipe {I kept making more as I went along}. It's easy to divide the frosting into separate bowls and add food coloring. Just know that as you go along your icing way, you may periodically need to add a drop or two of water to each bowl of frosting and stir it up, as the frosting tends to start drying out quickly.

This icing recipe functioned WAY better than I'd recalled, and I was pleased with the result:

{The OCD in me wants my frosting to be nice and neat}

Please be sure to try this sugar cookie recipe some time...I promise that it will rock your world!