Chef Jessi

This weekend I learned that I didn't know very much about making cookies, especially sugar cookies. Saturday, I told Jessi that we would bake. She loves to cook and bake. She watches the Food Network as much as Jenna watches the Disney Channel. As a matter of fact, they often disagree about which channel to watch. So, she picked Sugar Cookies because she got a cookie decorating kit for Christmas and wanted to use it. (That thing was about as complicated as the sugar cookies were for me). Anyway, I found a recipe in my book that I printed from http://www.recipes.com/, submitted by Jill Saunders. I hoped the name, "The Best Rolled Sugar Cookies" said it all. All of the reviews were positive and no one suggested any changes to the recipe so in we dove. I set everything up while Jessi read the ingredients and the directions. We had trouble from the beginning. The recipe calls for 5 cups of flour and I ended up only adding about 2.5 cups because I don't think I could've added much more. The dough had to be refrigerated overnight because it was very soft. After one roll the following day, we had to let the dough set up again in the refrigerator. It seemed to soften very quickly. The dough was also very sticky and we needed to use a lot of flour to keep it from sticking to everything. The cookies tasted great and I may try the 5 cups next time because great sugar cookies are now one of my next challenges! I'm going to post the recipe as written because I have a feeling it was the baker and not the recipe! So...Jessi really did all of the work. She read the directions, rolled out the dough, cut out the cookies, mixed the food coloring and icing, and decorated them.Of course, the cleanup was left to me!


Jessi's work station and the mess!

We finished after about 3 hours on Sunday and had about 4 dozen cookies that did taste great.


Ingredients:
1 1/2 c. butter, softened 5 c. all-purpose flour
2 c. white sugar 2 tsp baking powder
4 eggs 1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Directions:
1) In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour. ( I recommend overnight).
2) Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
3) Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.