Sugar Cookies: They Aren't Just for Christmas Anymore

If all you want is the fun of helping the kids roll and decorate sugar cookies for Christmas, this is not the recipe for you. This recipe will make the lightest, crispest, most delicate sugar cookies you have ever tasted, but the fragile dough requires careful handling, overnight chilling, and a reasonably experienced cook. It's my grandmother's recipe, one she learned from her housekeeper sometime in the 1920s.

In the winter I serve these sugar cookies plain, still warm from the oven, with hot chocolate made from Mexican chocolate tablets. In the summer they are great with sweet white wine, like a Sauterne or Gewürztraminer.

INGREDIENTS:
2 C sugar
1 C unsalted butter (real butter, not margarine)
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract (real vanilla, please)
1 C sour cream (real sour cream, not that low-calory fake stuff)
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 1/2 C flour, sifted before measuring. (pastry flour is best, if you have it, but all-purpose flour works too. Don't try it if all you have is bread flour because the high gluten will guarantee tough cookies.)

MIXING:
1 - Cream the sugar and butter together until they are light and fluffy.
2 - Beat the eggs in a separate bowl unitl they are light and fluffy, then thoroughly blend the eggs, vanilla and sour cream into the butter and sugar mix. It should look like fluffy frosting.
3 - Sift the dry ingredients together, and add them to the mix 1/2 cup at a time, blending gently between additions. Stop as soon as the last of the flour is blended in. Overmixing makes the cookies tough.
4 - Tightly cover the dough, or divide it into several small freezer containers and put it in the freezer overnight, or longer. It can be frozen for about two weeks with no loss of quality.

The next day, or later that week, heat the oven to 425 and get ready to roll.

ROLLING AND CUTTING:
TIP: Don't try to work with the dough in a hot kitchen - it softens quickly. Granny used to send us to the unheated porch to do the rolling and cutting. In Montana, in the winter, we'd be standing there in our snowsuits rolling out cookies.

1 - Use as little flour as possible when you roll them out. Using a non-stick silicone sheet might be better, if you have one.
2 - Roll the dough thinly, cut rounds 2-3 inches across, and bake them on a lightly greased (or non-stick) cookie sheet at 425 for about 5 minutes until lightly browned.
3 - Immediately transfer the cookies to cool on a hand-embroidered linen tea towel like my grandmother did, or paper towels like I do.
4 - Let the baking sheet cool before you bake another batch.

Gently mash the scraps together, chill them and re-roll them separately. They are never as delicate as the first cookies.

DECORATING: These are fragile cookies. A dusting of colored sugar before baking or a dribble of icing after they cool is all the decorating they can handle.

YIELD: I don't know how many cookies it will make, because it's delicious before it's baked and we eat the uncooked dough. Yes, I know, salmonella and all that, but at least half of this dough never makes it to the oven in my house. I estimate 4 to 6 dozen cookies if you roll 1/4 inch thin and use 2-inch round cutters.