The Famous Sugar Cookies

I call these famous only because I get a lot of requests for these at Christmas and get told all the time that they're extra amazing. The secret? Almond extract. I wish I thought of it myself, but I didn't. It's in the recipe I use. The best part? You don't need to refrigerate the dough before you roll it out. I don't have enough foresight to actually make the dough the day before I plan to bake the cookies. I've made these cookies dozens of times and the recipe always turns out amazing.

I have these down to a science: each pan bakes for 4 minutes in the oven, then they're taken out and cooled on the cookie sheet for 2 minutes until I transfer it to a wire cooling rack until it's time for frosting. The cookies turn out soft without being gooey, but baked enough so they aren't super crunchy. No one likes a hard sugar cookie.

The downside of these cookies? The mess. See below for proof.

As mentioned in my last post, I use the Wilton gel food coloring. It makes much better vibrant colors than the liquid stuff, plus you can buy a specific shade of green and not have to try to mix colors together to get your desired color. Much easier! I made a double batch of frosting and divided it up into bowls and then added blue, yellow, green, and red to get my Christmas colors.

Here are some of the finished cookies. I'm a big fan of the Santa ones...I usually make some black frosting and make a mouth for Santa but I just wasn't feeling like making a whole bunch more colors. The bottoms of the trees had to be red instead of brown for the same reason, but I still think they're cute. And more importantly, they taste good!