Sugar Cookies: They Aren't Just for Christmas Anymore

You Don't Even Have to Celebrate Christmas to Eat These Cookies

If all you want is the fun of helping the kids roll and decorate sugar cookies for Christmas, this is not the recipe for you. This recipe will make the lightest, crispest, most delicate sugar cookies you have ever tasted, but the fragile dough requires careful handling, overnight chilling, and a reasonably experienced cook. It's my grandmother's recipe, one she learned from her housekeeper sometime in the 1920s.

In the winter I serve these sugar cookies plain, still warm from the oven, with hot chocolate made from Mexican chocolate tablets. In the summer they are great with sweet white wine, like a Sauterne or Gewürztraminer.

INGREDIENTS:
2 C sugar
1 C unsalted butter (real butter, not margarine)
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract (real vanilla, please)
1 C sour cream (real sour cream, not that low-calory fake stuff)
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 1/2 C flour, sifted before measuring. (pastry flour is best, if you have it, but all-purpose flour works too. Don't try it if all you have is bread flour because the high gluten will guarantee tough cookies.)

MIXING:
1 - Cream the sugar and butter together until they are light and fluffy.
2 - Beat the eggs in a separate bowl unitl they are light and fluffy, then thoroughly blend the eggs, vanilla and sour cream into the butter and sugar mix. It should look like fluffy frosting.
3 - Sift the dry ingredients together, and add them to the mix 1/2 cup at a time, blending gently between additions. Stop as soon as the last of the flour is blended in. Overmixing makes the cookies tough.
4 - Tightly cover the dough, or divide it into several small freezer containers and put it in the freezer overnight, or longer. It can be frozen for about two weeks with no loss of quality.

The next day, or later that week, heat the oven to 425 and get ready to roll.

ROLLING AND CUTTING:
TIP: Don't try to work with the dough in a hot kitchen - it softens quickly. Granny used to send us to the unheated porch to do the rolling and cutting. In Montana, in the winter, we'd be standing there in our snowsuits rolling out cookies.