Bake

Sugar Cookies With Buttercream Frosting

December  3, 2019
5
5 Ratings
Photo by Rocky Luten. Food stylist: Samantha Seneviratne. Prop stylist: Brooke Deonarine.
  • Prep time 45 minutes
  • Cook time 10 minutes
  • Makes 18 2-inch cookies
Author Notes

If any one ingredient signals the holiday season, it’s butter. Of course, cinnamon, caramel, and chocolate will put a twinkle in your eye, but those flavors are always carried on the back of butter. Good butter is an indulgence­—double the price of its commodity cousin—and worth every penny for holiday cooking and baking.

Every Christmas, I make a big chocolate cake, often a variation on a Buche de Noel. This year I’ll be making Food & Wine’s December cover recipe (because, you know, I work there), Chocolate-and-Citrus Cassata, rich with vanilla-orange ricotta and glazed in shiny bittersweet ganache, it is absolutely full of butter.

I’ll also be making my wife’s favorite cookies, a version of the soft, buttercream-frosted, cut-out sugar cookies found in plastic clamshells at most grocery stores. Our friend Ashley shared her family’s recipe, one that she brings to parties throughout the year, decorated as Jack-o-Lanterns, Easter eggs, or snowmen and Christmas trees depending on the occasion. The difference between her version and the grocery store ones is, you guessed it, really good butter. With two sticks split between the dough and the frosting, the resulting melt-in-your-mouth cookies are even better the next day and will last in an airtight container in the fridge for several days.

Cut the chilled dough simply into squares or rounds, or punch out festive shapes with cookie cutters and decorate accordingly. The whipped, sweet frosting can be tinted with a few drops of food coloring, and sprinkles are always a welcome addition. The most important key to making these cookies tender is to not overbake them. Watch closely for the edges to puff, and for the centers to form a skin but not become firm or fully rise; the cakey, thick cookies will set to the perfect texture as they cool. Frost the cooled cookies and let the surface of the frosting dry, which will take a couple of hours. If you can control yourself, wait until the next day, once the frosting and cookies have fused; that great quality butter will guarantee the cookies stay soft and rich. Pair with milk or bourbon, depending on your audience.
Mary-Frances Heck

Test Kitchen Notes

Featured in: Food52's Holiday Cookie Chronicles —The Editors

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Ingredients
  • Sugar Cookies
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick, 1/4 pound, or 113g) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 cup (200g) granulated sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons cold water
  • 2 cups (250g) all-purpose flour
  • 1 batch Vanilla Frosting (recipe below)
  • Buttercream Frosting
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick, 1/4 pound, or 113g) unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 pound (455g) powdered sugar, sifted
  • 3 to 4 tablespoons whole milk
  • 1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped out (or 1 t vanilla bean paste or vanilla extract)
Directions
  1. Sugar Cookies
  2. Arrange oven rack in center of oven and preheat to 400°F (200°C). (If you can’t fit two cookie sheets on one rack, arrange in upper and lower thirds and plan to rotate during baking.) Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment.
  3. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy with a hand mixer. Add in this order, mixing fully between each addition: the egg, vanilla, salt, and baking powder; beat until fluffy again. Add flour ½ cup at a time, beating to just incorporate each addition, and adding 1 to 2 tablespoons of cold water before last addition of flour to moisten dough. Dough should look like a bowl of pebbles after last addition of flour. Set mixer aside and knead dough in bowl until it just comes together, about 10 turns.
  4. Roll (or pat or smush) dough between parchment to a ¼-inch (6mm) thick 9 1/2-inch (24-cm) wide round. Pop into the freezer for 15 minutes until dough is hard. Remove top sheet of parchment and cut cookies as desired. Place cut dough on parchment-lined cookie sheets. Gather scraps and re-roll dough once (no need to freeze again).
  5. Bake cookies until edges are just puffed and center has a slight crust/skin but hasn’t taken on any color around edges, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and slide parchment onto cooling racks; let cookies cool completely before frosting with a nice schmear. Let frosting firm before serving. Store in an airtight container; cookies are best the next day.
  1. Buttercream Frosting
  2. Beat butter until smooth and fluffy, then gradually incorporate powdered sugar. Add milk and vanilla and beat until fluffy and lightened by a few shades and vanilla is evenly distributed.
  3. Cover and keep cool—but don’t refrigerate—until ready to frost cookies, up to a few hours.

See what other Food52ers are saying.

4 Reviews

SummerDay January 20, 2024
AWESOME Cookies! I’ve never be very good at making sugar cookies but this recipe is SOO O Easy and foolproof! Made them for Christmas and I made them a little big so I didn’t have as many but Boy did they go FAST! There were 5 left which my Gtanddaughter took home with her ☺️. She’s such a picky eater I was surprised that she loved them so much They were very easy to make and everything about them was Delicious! I’m gonna make a batch today just for my husband and I😀 Also the Icing is incredible Jyst make an extra batch off cookies then you will use all the icing😂
Heather H. December 22, 2020
I doubled the sugar cookie recipe but not the frosting recipe and I still had half the frosting left over. Unless you're piling on the frosting, expect to have a lot left over. I would have used all the frosting if I had quadrupled the recipe. A double recipe made 5 dozen cut out cookies plus six 2 inch round cookies from the remnants. I followed the recipe exactly and thought it turned out fine though I did add a bit of almond extract to both the dough and the frosting in addition to the vanilla.
Licia B. December 10, 2020
Lovely, solid recipe with minor edits. Increased the vanilla from 1/2 tsp to 3/4 tsp and used milk instead of water to moisten the dough. I wish I would have cut the salt to 1/4 tsp. The 1/2 tsp as written is too salty for a cookie. Skipped cutting the cookies and simply rolled them into balls and pressed them into disks with the bottom of a glass. Only used 1/2 of the frosting recipe for the full cookie recipe, which nicely covered every cookie with nothing left over. Delish!
Deborah December 25, 2019
These are so stinkin’ good that I just sang them a song of love. Also, they go gluten-free perfectly with KAF Measure for Measure. I will make them forever.