Like most moms, I’ve been making cut-out cookies for years and years, with or without the “help” of my kids.  Here’s the annual routine – as I make the dough, they are chomping at the bit to help cut out the cookies while the dough chills.  We cut them out together and while the cookies bake, the kids just can’t wait until the cookies are cool enough to frost and decorate.  They rush into the kitchen, happy and excited as can be, decorate about 6 cookies each, destroying the kitchen in the process, and then are bored of the process and run off to play while I am stuck decorating the remaining 5 dozen cookies and cleaning up sprinkles from every corner of the kitchen for months to come.  Sound familiar!?!  It’s a wonder I ever decided to teach kids to cook after this yearly event.  The other problem I used to have with cut-out sugar cookies is that they would spread out on the pan while baking, losing much of their original shape.  It was often hard to tell a Santa from a snowman!  After research, trial, and error, I finally came up with two solutions.  First, instead of using flour to dust on the work surface and the top of the dough, use granulated sugar.  All that flour that gets incorporated into the dough when rolling and re-rolling throws off the composition of the dough and causes it to spread.  Next, chill the cut-out cookies before baking to firm up the butter in the dough – problem solved.  Now Santa looks like Santa and a star actually has defined points at its ends. Another tip; if your circle of dough is too large to loosen from the counter with a pastry scraper (also called a bench knife), the bottom of a tart pan does a wonderful job of getting to the center of the dough to get it unstuck from the counter.

[Read more →]