Ugly Christmas Sweater Cookies (best sugar cookie recipe) (2024)

FAQs

Why don t sugar cookies keep their shape? ›

Too much sugar and butter can make sugar cookies spread and lose their shape when baked. This one requires a little patience because once you roll out your dough, you are ready to bake. Be patient and bake your cookies when the dough is really cold.

Take plain sugar cookies up a notch with exciting mix-ins like chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, toasted chopped nuts, chopped dried fruit or M&M's. Add these after blending your butter and egg into the sugar cookie mix.

Piping with Royal Icing

This thicker royal icing is perfect for the final decorations that sit on top of a cookie and make it so much fun. Remember that each flooded cookie should be completely dry before you start to decorate with piping icing. If it's not dry, your piped decorations will bleed into the thinner icing.

Modern Christmas cookies can trace their history to recipes from Medieval Europe biscuits, when many modern ingredients such as cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, almonds and dried fruit were introduced into the west.

Don't bother softening the butter: I like to use cold, cubed butter when I make the dough. It saves the step of chilling the dough before baking, which is another trick many bakers use to help their cookies keep their shape.

The holes trick

There's also a new technique going around when preventing craters in a second layer of icing: poke holes in the base flood (under the area you'll cover with a second layer of icing). You can even do this when the first layer flood has completely dried!

Roll on floured surface until 1/4 inch thick. Cut with 2 1/2-inch cutter. Bake 8 to 11 minutes.

You can also try adding sprinkles to your cookies before baking, but depending on the recipe, they may melt in the oven. Try it out with one cookie before committing to an entire batch.

Allow cookies to cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before decorating. I like to decorate cookies directly on baking sheets so I can stick the entire baking sheet in the refrigerator to help set the icing. So place the cooled cookies back on baking sheets.

On the naughty list of cookies, Americans gave the lowest win records to anise cookies, which only won 29% of its matchups.

What are the most Googled Christmas cookies? ›

Italian Christmas Cookies grow as top cookie

Zoom in: Italian Christmas Cookies were the top cookie in 13 states, more than double the six states from 2022, Google Trends curator Katie Seaton told Axios. Seaton said the Italian cookies dominated the East Coast both this year and last year.

Spice, spice baby

When aromatics, such as nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger, became more widely available in Europe in the Middle Ages, they were put to good use at holiday baking time. It became tradition to combine butter and sugar — which cost a pretty penny back then — with these prized spices once a year at Christmas.

If your oven is too hot or too cold, it may influence whether or not your cookies spread properly. If you didn't preheat your oven to the correct temperature before placing your tray of cookies in the oven, it will be too cold and your cookies won't have enough time to spread.

The most common culprit behind non-spreading cookies is too much flour. This may seem counterintuitive—after all, isn't flour a key ingredient in baking? Yes, but if you add too much flour, your cookies won't spread as they bake.

First, try adding more liquid to the dough. This can be milk, water, or even just a little bit of extra oil. If that doesn't work, you can try kneading the dough for a few minutes to help it come together. Lastly, if all else fails, you can always add in a few tablespoons of flour to help bind the dough together.