Marsha's Soft Sugar Cookies

These cookies are perfect for our yearly Christmas cookie decorating. Soft and fluffy! We love them.

Marsha's Soft Sugar Cookies

3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
1 cup shortening or margarine
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs

Stir together dry ingredients. Cut in shortening or margarine and mix until crumbly. Combine eggs, milk and vanilla, then add to flour mixture. Dough should be soft but fairly stiff. Add additional flour if needed. Chill dough for at least an hour. With plenty of flour on your surface, roll out dough to about 1/3 inch thick and cut. Bake at 400 degrees for 6-8 minutes. Let cool then frost.

*One batch makes plenty of cookies, but not a ton for things like neighbor giving. Cookies spread while baking (how much surprised me the first time we made them) so give them a good inch or more between each cookie on the baking sheet. Re-chill the dough between cuttings to make it easier to handle rather than adding more flour and getting a harder cookie. Just barely browned edges equals a fully cooked cookie. Because these cookies are nice and soft, they don't hold a stamp pattern very well.

Just a friendly reminder to myself to box up our cookies before bed on Christmas if we put them in the garage so they don't dry out. 

For a Christmas cookie decorating party for our family, when I pair this recipe with some gingerbread cookies, 1 batch is plenty. If we have a couple of guests, 1 1/2 batches works well. But unless we have TONS of people, two batches with gingerbread cookies is too much.

Favorite Toppings: M&M's, pearls, sparkly sprinkles, chocolate chips.

Frosting: We have been making a basic powdered sugar and milk frosting that we color with food coloring and put into squeeze bottles. Just be careful that it's not too runny to fall off the cookie or bleed the pattern, but still soft enough that it can come out of the squeeze bottle.

Notes from Christmas 2022- Sugar cookies were perfectly done (depending on thickness) at 350 with convection @ 7 minutes. Gingerbread cookies were done in 9 minutes at 350 with convection. To cut and bake one batch of sugar cookies AND one batch of gingerbread dough took us about 2 hours including cleanup and another 30 minutes to get the last couple trays cooked. (Not including time to make the dough because it has to chill so we made the dough the day before. Sugar cookie dough can be placed on plastic wrap, wrapped up and put in the fridge. Gingerbread dough is too runny for that, so just leave it in the mixing bowl, place plastic wrap directly touching the dough in the bowl and then another piece tightly secured over the bowl.