How to make the perfect sugar cookies for Christmas gifting – recipe | Biscuits

Gingerbread aside, we don’t tend to celebrate Christmas with biscuits here in the UK, unless you count the entire tartan variety tin of shortbread you eat by mistake in a low moment in mid-January. In the US, however, biscuits (cookies) are A Big Deal, and almost a competitive sport. Taking their cue from the Germanic and Scandinavian tradition of plätzchen and lebkuchen, the American holiday cookie platter is, Chicago-based food writer Tim Mazurek explains, “a generous fantasia where butter cookies decorated like angels mingle with rugelach and rum balls. The cookie platter doesn’t care about your religion, or lack of one. It welcomes everyone and promises that you’ll find something you like.”

I was completely unaware of this custom until an American-born friend appeared on my doorstep last December bearing a handsomely wrapped package of no fewer than seven varieties of biscuit, so count me a convert, Lord. Less divisive than mince pies and fruitcake, and considerably easier than panettone, biscuits keep and travel well, and are open to all manner of glitzy customisation, making them the ideal edible present. Here I’ve stuck to the simplest sort, the rolled vanilla cookie, but once you’ve mastered that, the world is your glittery gift platter.

The sugar

Cookie enthusiast Ben Mims writes in Crumbs, his extraordinary collection of recipes from around the world, that the sugar cookie represents a definitive break with European tradition, being chewy, dense and plain, rather than dry, crumbly and spiced. Described by the Cooks Illustrated team as the “Plain Janes of classic American cookies” and by Alison Roman in her book Sweet Enough as “the most boring cookies in the world … but that’s OK”, they’re a close relative of shortbread and Danish butter cookies, but involve more flour and less butter than either. Disappointing as I know that might sound, it makes for a more robust dough that’s easier to handle and perfect for cutting into suitably festive shapes – plus, because they’re less rich, you can eat more of them, and Christmas is, if nothing else, a season of gluttony.

They’re always a mixture of flour, butter and sugar: as Stella Parks explains on Serious Eats, most recipes “start with a 1:2:3 dough, made from one, two and three parts sugar, fat and flour by weight”. The problem is, as she observes, though flour makes for a sturdy, pastry-like dough that’s perfect for rolling and cutting, it doesn’t taste particularly good, “no matter how much salt and vanilla you add”.

Her solution is to increase the amount of sugar in the dough, which, she concedes, does increase their propensity to spread in the oven. It also, for my testers and me, left them a little sweet, especially once iced. At a time of year that’s not short on sugar, a slightly plainer version was preferred: the 40% by weight favoured by Anja Dunk in her book Advent and Rose Levy Beranbaum in Rose’s Celebrations seems to fit the bill better, though in the end I decided to increase it to Roman and Dorie Greenspan’s 50%. Doing so seemed to help with crispness, which I’ve favoured over chewiness, because I’m European and like a snappy biscuit, however dense and plain.

Most recipes call for caster or superfine sugar, with the exception of Roman’s, which combines icing and granulated varieties. I don’t like the fine crumbliness the former brings, but I do like the crunch of the granulated sugar. However, I found on its own the coarser grain gave the cookies a pockmarked surface and a more open crumb, making caster the sounder choice. (Brown sugars soak up more moisture than white varieties, and are better suited to softer biscuits.)

The fat

All the recipes I try use butter, though I suspect hard, non-dairy fats would prove a success in the texture department at least, their high melting point helping the resulting dough to maintain its shape when heated. As with sugar, there’s a delicate balance to be struck: too much butter, and the cookies will melt in the oven; too little, and they’ll be bland. My testers felt that the 50% of the total weight of flour in Levy Beranbaum’s wasn’t enough, while the 75% in Roman’s was judged too soft and rich.

Parks adds another, harder fat to the mixture in the form of coconut oil, which, she says, “lowers the water content of the dough, upping the richness of the cookies and thereby improving their shelf life”. She calls for the refined variety, to add richness without flavour. It works, but I’m loth to suggest an ingredient that might require some detective work to track down, depending on where you live, at a time of year when time is in short supply.

Cooks Illustrated, meanwhile, uses cream cheese to add flavour to its dough, which, along with its method of rubbing the fat into the flour, rather than creaming the butter and sugar, gives a flaky, slightly tangy result that’s almost like eating cream cheese pastry. Delicious, but not exactly what I’m after here.

Oddly enough, however, the best, crunchiest examples come from Greenspan’s recipe in her book Dorie’s Cookies, which uses even more butter than Roman, but, crucially, lacks her egg yolks. Butter, like sugar, equals flavour, and I’d prefer a buttery cookie to a very sweet one, so I’ve gone high. (Critics may argue that this veers into butter cookie or even shortbread territory, but, importantly, my version stays snappy and crisp, rather than sandy and crumbly.)

Beating the butter and sugar does not just combine the two ingredients, it also whips air into them, which, while ideal for featherlight, well-risen cookies, is less desirable for a firm, sturdy biscuit. Instead, I try melting the butter first, and chilling the dough to solidify it, which leaves the biscuits dense and soft. I then try creaming much of the butter and adding just a little melted butter, which improves the situation, and I even try clarifying that butter to reduce its water content. But the solution comes from the reverse creaming method recommended by Dunk and Cooks Illustrated. This, Parks writes elsewhere, coats the flour with butter, creating a “physical barrier between the flour proteins and water, slowing the process of hydration and thereby limiting the amount of gluten that can form”. Without gluten to add chew or aeration to help it rise, the cookie will stay thin and crisp, though this makes it even more important to chill the dough before baking, to check its subsequent increased tendency to spread.

The eggs

I try recipes using whole eggs (Parks and Levy Beranbaum), eggs and egg yolks (Roman), yolks alone (Dunk) and whites alone (Greenspan), as well as experimenting with all of the above once I’ve determined the ratio of flour to butter and sugar. Yolks alone give a soft, almost cakey consistency echoed more faintly in the whole egg cookies, while the whites-only version is crisp around the edge but chewy in the middle.

Leaving out the eggs altogether, however, leaves me with something more like brittle pastry. After many many batches of imperfect cookies, I find that combining egg white, whose proteins help bind the mixture, with reverse creaming and a relatively low oven temperature yields the crisp, sturdy results I’m after.

The raising agents

Parks and Roman use baking powder in their cookies, with the former also adding bicarbonate of soda for good measure. Cook’s Illustrated, Levy Beranbaum, Dunk and Greenspan don’t use any at all, which seems to make sense to me, because any puffing up seems guaranteed to happen outwards in all directions, inevitably distorting the shape of the finished biscuits.

The flavour

The beauty of this recipe is that you can add just about any flavour you like to the dough in the form of extracts, zests or dried spices – vanilla is the classic American choice, and I really like both Levy Beranbaum and Dunk’s citrus zests and Parks’s almond extract, which adds a richness of flavour that echoes that of the butter.

Baking temperature

I try baking them hot, at 190C, and low, at 140C, but find they colour too quickly in the first instance, while the more moderate temperature gives the dough too much time to spread before it sets. A satisfactory compromise comes from putting the cookies into a hot oven, then turning the heat down immediately, but you will need to rotate them once, as well as keep an eye on them – I like my cookies slightly browned, but a shining golden biscuit might be better for your purposes.

The icing

There’s no need to ice these – a dusting of glitter is much easier – but it does feel in the American spirit. Royal icing, made from whisked egg whites and sugar, is the classic choice, but it’s an undeniable faff, especially if, like Parks, you heat the whole thing over a bain-marie. Cooks Illustrated uses a simpler icing sugar and cream cheese mixture, but my favourite icing is Dunk’s simple icing sugar and orange juice mixture, probably because it’s the easiest.

You’ll get a more robust mixture, however, by adding a little syrup; corn syrup is the usual choice in the US, but golden syrup is more accessible here. It will, however, give your icing a faintly beige hue, as will the vanilla my friend Autumn, baker of the glorious basket of cookies that kicked this whole quest off, insists is a must – so if you’d prefer a snowier finish, use glucose syrup (easily found in baking sections of the supermarket) and a dash of a clear flavouring instead. Make sure you leave enough time for it to set, though – after almost 15 batches of the things, I can assure you that patience is very much a virtue in the Christmas cookie game.

Perfect rolled sugar cookies

Prep 10 min
Cook 40 min
Chill 1 hr+
Makes About 45 medium-sized cookies

For the cookies
275g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
140g caster sugar
½ tsp fine salt
220g cold butter
1 egg white, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp almond extract (optional)

For the icing
200g icing sugar
A pinch of salt (optional)
2 tbsp golden syrup, or liquid glucose or honey
1 tsp vanilla extract, or other flavouring of your choice
A little milk, or water
Colouring and/or decorations of your choice

Put the flour, sugar and salt in a food processor and pulse briefly to combine, or put them in a large bowl and whisk (though a processor is preferable).