Roll-Out Sugar Cookies

I had a friend's housewarming party to attend one night, and due to my constrained budget and also the fact that she totally has everything she could possibly want already anyway... I thought I'd do something special and bake her some cookies instead.

And stuff them in a pretty jar. Which I now want to buy for myself!

All those beautiful cookies posted online, you know the ones: sugar cookies with pretty glaze icing decorations... sigh... I stared at countless images, re-read tons of recipes, and watched youtube videos on how to mix, decorate, store, etc...

I failed.

Decorating with glaze icing was a lot more difficult that I expected. No matter how much I sifted the damned sugar, my icing still had trouble coming out of my Wilton tip, so I gave up after an hour of miserable failure!

The cookies, however, turned out fantastic!

I tweaked one of my aunt's basic cookie recipes, in minor ways:

• 3/4 cups butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3 egg whites
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cups self-raising flour

1. Cream butter and sugar
2. Add egg whites and vanilla and beat until creamy and fluffy, and pretty! (I wish I'd taken photos, but it was at 3 in the morning, and I couldn't be bovvered to set up the lights)
3. Gradually add the flour until fully incorporated
4. Drop the dough in a ball into a square of cling wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Like I said, it was 3 am, so I left it overnight and continued in the morning.
5. When you're ready to bake, roll the dough out on a generously floured surface (I know my aunt likes to use a mixture of flour and sifted sugar for this, but I used just flour cos I try to reduce the sweetness). I think in the process of rolling my dough out and getting it to the perfect consistency, I use a good 2 more cups of flour for the whole batch.
6. Roll your dough out as thick as you want it (I like to go about 1/2 cm) and cut out your shapes (FUN!)
7. Lay your cookie cutouts on a lined baking sheet, and bake for 10 minutes at170 degrees Celsius, OR more importantly until it reaches a lovely light golden shade. Try not to let your cookies brown at the edges.

Decorate if you want to, but as of yet, I haven't found a cookie icing recipe that works. But on their own, it's just so good to have a jar of these cookies always on hand for snacking.

Hope you like it!

x Nabs