Christmas Sugar Cookies

Since I didn't work this year for Christmas break, apart from babysitting, I had a lot of free time on my hands. So, of course, I decided to spend as many hours as possible baking and decorating cookies. I am so annoyed with myself though because I bought new food coloring, plastic piping bags and tips and cookie cutters when I had some in the closet at my moms house the entire time. It's ok, because I would have had to buy red anyway (but still annoying regardless) Thats a lot of $dough$ even with the killer Michaels discounts. And I also have all of my goods at Elon, so that was annoying too. But I actually use them there, so at least they weren't just sitting in another state for no reason.

Decorating these things is addicting. I'm ready for round 3….

Christmas Sugar Cookies 
I got the recipe here and followed the advice from the comments

Ingredients

1 ½ cups butter, room temperature

3 cups of sugar

4 eggs

5 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

2 tsps vanilla

In a medium sized bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt.

In a large together, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then add the eggs and vanilla.

In 3 increments, add the flour mixture to the large bowl, using a spatula (not the mixer).

Either cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or over night. You can also separate the dough into two balls or disks and wrap in plastic wrap. (It was hard digging out the hard dough from the bowl, so I prefer doing it this way and breaking off pieces at a time)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lightly flour your work space and rolling pin and roll out the dough to about ¼ to ½ inch thickness. Cut out shapes with a cookie cutter and place on a silpat or tin foil (I rotate between the two because I only have one silpat)

If your oven maintains a consistent temperature, bake for 6 to 8 minutes – making sure the edges don’t get too brown. A faint brown edge is ok, but maintaining a light tan color is preferable.  Cool completely.

For my decorating icing I use this recipe from Sweetopia, but I add a teaspoon or so of almond extract to tone down the strong flavor of the confectioners sugar. 

The bite sized ones might be my favorite, although they are a little too easy to eat...