Sugar Cookies

I have a love-hate relationship with sugar cookies. They're a lot of work and don't taste that great, but they're so festive and fun and remind me of being a kid. The love outweighs the hate, so I end up making them for various holidays. I found a recipe on allrecipes.com that is pretty awesome. These cookies tasted like those ones you can buy at Wal-Mart with a half inch thick blob of frosting on top. You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, they're pretty good. I made this in honor of Easter and spring, even though it's far from spring weather here. Well, it is above freezing, so that's saying something

I let the dough chill overnight.

Before the baking.

After the baking with the frosting outline.

I wanted to try and use royal icing because it's pretty and looks impressive. I, however, do not have meringue powder and felt weird about using raw egg whites. I found a recipe using heavy cream that looked shiny and pretty, so I used that. I was pretty pleased with how these turned out. I really liked the pretty pastel colors. I think the blue birds are my favorite. Even though it looks like a lot of work, the whole process from start to finish was about 1.5 hours, including clean-up. Not bad for sugar cookies!

Sugar cookies
(from allrecipes.com)
INGREDIENTS: (I made half this recipe and it made roughly 24 cookies.)
1 1/2 cups butter, softened
2 cups white sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
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 (or overnight).
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). 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.

Creamy Icing
1 cup sifted powdered sugar
Pinch of salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tbsp heavy cream
Food coloring

I just mixed it all together and added more powdered sugar and cream until I got the consistency I wanted. For the outline of the cookies I made a thicker icing. For the frosting in the middle I added a bit more cream. The measurements above are really sort of guidelines, not exact measurements. You can't really screw up this icing too much no matter what you do.