Sumi's Kitchen: Sugar Cookies

Baked my first batch of cookies for the season. It all started when my son came home from school whinning about how they made cookies at school and how he wanted to do the same at home. It was funny to watch him explaining the whole act of making the cookies as if trying to teach me how to do it. He was like "Don't make round balls amma, roll out like chapati and I will cut into shapes". Nowadays kids are very clear about what they want and how they want it.

Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 cup cup all purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup unsalted butter , room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla extract

Method:
Sift the flour, salt and baking soda in a bowl
Beat the butter and sugar till light and fluffy (2 -3 mins)
Add the egg abd beat for another 2 mins until pale and creamy
Now add the Vanilla extract and beat for another minute.
Add the flour mixture and beat till combined.
Take out the dough and shape it to a disc, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour.
Roll out the dough and cut into shapes.
Place the cut out dough on tray covered with wax paper or parchment paper.
Sprinkle some coloured sugar or sprinklers or plain white sugar. (optional)
Bake for 8 - 10 mins. The edges should be slightly brown.
Cool on a wire rack. This measurement yields about 18-20 medium sized cookies

These cookies turned out not as sugary as I thought it would be.It was buttery and mildly sweet.
Note:
Always keep the unused dough covered with plastic wrap.
You can also freeze the remaining dough and used it later

My first attempt in decorating Sugar Cookies.
I attempted to decorate some of the cookies after being inspired by this post from Aparna
I used the same recipe she gave there for icing. The icing was little bit thin .
for me so I added a tsp of corn starch and some more sugar to thicken it up. At first it was very difficult to get hold of the process, after a few cookies or rather mishaps, some of them came out better.
It takes a lot of patience and time to decorate the cookies, may be it will ease up with practice. My son likes it, so that's all it takes for me to try it again :)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup icing sugar
2 tsp corn starch
1 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp milk/water
a drop of required colour.

Mix everything well except the colour. Increase the water /milk by a tsp at a time if want to thin the Icing.
Increase the sugar and cornstarch by 1/2 tsp each to thicken the icing.
Seperate into small bowls and add the required colour. I used cocoa powder to get the brown colour.
I used little ziplog bags for the piping.Make sure to cut a tiny hole to get a smooth line.