Vanilla Sugar Cookies

Valentine’s Day was made extra sweet with the addition of the sugar cookies I made for my students, colleagues and of course, my Love, Sebastian.

The idea for these sweet cookies came from a beautiful post at Annie’s Eats.

Although my cookie cutter was much smaller than hers, I tried to recreate the adorable marbled designs she used.

This was my first attempt using royal icing and marbling but I was really pleased with the results.

I adapted a sugar cookie recipe from Annie’s Eats as well.

What can I say, when someone does it right, there’s no need to go anywhere else.

Annie’s sugar cookie called for almond extract but due to allergies, almond products aren’t allowed at school.

As a result, my cookies were vanilla through and through.

Simple ingredients for delicious cookies.

Cream the butter.

Sift in the powdered sugar.

 Cream together the butter and sugar.

 Beat the egg.

Blend in the egg, vanilla, salt and flour.

It will be hard, but try to keep your fingers out of this buttery, soft, fluffy dough.

Flatten the dough into an even layer and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate dough until it’s firm. I left my dough in the fridge overnight and baked the cookies the next morning.

Prepare your work surface and chilled dough.

Roll your dough out on a well-floured surface. I broke my dough into two batches and it worked well for me.

You want the dough to be about 1/4 inch thick. The thickness of the dough at this point will be the same thickness of the baked cookie.

Start cookie cutting.

 Squeeze them in.

This may be my new favorite photo.

  Bake the cookies for about 8 minutes, you want to remove them from the oven before they golden. 

Allow the cookies to cool slightly on the pan before moving them to a cooling rack.

Cooled cookies.

Space out the cookies, getting ready to frost.

Since I went through frosting the cookies earlier, I’ll just share the photos and a quick caption here.

If you want to learn about the eggless royal icing I used or how to marble the cookies, please visit this post.

Outline the cookies.

Flood the inside with pink icing and marble with white icing and a toothpick.

Just be careful that you don’t over-flood the cookies or they will look a bit psychedelic.

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
1 egg, beaten
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. salt
2 ½ cups sifted flour

Directions:
Cream butter. Sift in the powdered sugar and whip with the butter. Blend in egg, vanilla, salt and flour. Chill dough until firm. Roll to ¼” thickness on a well-floured surface. Cut with cookie cutters. Place on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake at 375° F for 8-10 min. Cookies should not brown. Frost and decorate when cool.

I heart these cookies.

Looking good and tasting good, what more could you want?

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