Snowflake Sugar Cookies

This afternoon my daughter and I decided we needed to make cookies for Santa. I told my daughter about the fair old tradition of leaving cookies out for the jolly old man the night before Christmas. I told her that he has to take presents to a lot of other children so he gets hungry and its nice to leave him cookies to eat. Of course I was telling this to a 2-year-old so its hard to say how much of it she really understood but I do think she got something out of it. If nothing else she knows we made cookies for Santa.

I asked my friends to send sugar cookie recipes because I wanted to try a new one. I decided to use this basic recipe, mostly because in the email she mentioned that the cookies remained soft and I had all of the ingredients I needed already. I'm a sucker for soft sugar cookies, if they are hard or crunchy I won't eat them. They definitely turned out chewy and delicious. Here is the recipe sent to me from Katie McNames:

1 cup butter (softened)
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 tbsp milk
4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda

Mix together butter and sugar until thoroughly combined. Add eggs, vanilla extract, and milk. Mix well until thoroughly incorporated. In separate bowl combine flour, salt, and baking soda. Add flour mixture to batter slowly. The directions didn't say whether or not to refrigerate the dough but I did by separating the dough in half, covering in plastic wrap and refrigerating for about an hour. I also rolled out the dough on powdered sugar instead of the flour for added flavor.

Bake at 400 for 8-10 minutes (I baked for 7 minutes).

I used royal icing to decorate with this simple recipe:

1 box powdered sugar
5 tbsp meringue powder
1 tbsp vanilla extract
Add water until desired consistency is reached.

Thank you to everyone who sent me your cookie recipes. I will be trying all of them at some point in the near future.

Here are the pretty snowflakes.

My 2 1/2-year-old daughter had to decorate some of her own cookies for Santa too.