perfidy

Here's one for Ted, he of the rocket flavored biscotti. My sweet tooth is small and underdeveloped. It is a girly man of a sweet tooth. Most candy leaves me cold, I don't like cake and most cookies are too sweet for me. But there are three types of cookies I like. A good peanut butter cookie with a Hershey's kiss melted on top, chocolate chip cookies made by following with exacting precision the directions on the bag of Nestle's semi-sweet chocolate chips, and my family recipe sugar cookies.

My grandmother's grandmother^✶It turns out that it was my grandfather's grandmother had this recipe, and it probably was in the family for a long time before that. Holiday sugar cookies are typically brittle, crumbly, and in general unsatisfactory. Either that or they are chewy, doughy, and unsatisfactory. These cookies are the Citizen Kane, the George Washington, the Shakespeare of sugar cookies. My grandmother taught me to make them when a I was a small child, and I have modified the recipe slightly from what was handed down to me - though I think my alterations are actually more in keeping with the now lost original recipe. Herewith, the recipe:

Sift together:

1 cup granulated sugar
3 cups all purpose, unbleached flour (fresh flour makes a huge difference)¹1If you are gluten intolerant - as my wife discovered she was a couple years in the future of this post - you can invest countless hours experimenting with different combinations of non-wheat flours, or just use King Arthur's Measure for Measure gluten-rein flour.
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Cut in:

1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup lard²2later experimentation shows that a 2/3 to 1/3 shortening/lard mix yields better consistency and taste

Mix in:

2 large eggs
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
4 tbsp whole milk

Cool dough for one hour in the Frigidaire. Then, knead and roll out the dough on a pastry sheet to a thickness of a little more than a quarter inch.³3Or even a little thinner, really. Buy pastry rails, they're insanely useful and store in a pleasingly compact fashion.

Use a cookie cutter or small glass to cut the cookies, place them on a greased cookie sheet, and bake for 7-9 minutes at 350 degrees. The key is to take to cookies out just as they are beginning to brown, and as soon as the center is cooked. If the top of the cookie is brown, they are overdone.

I was taught to make the cookies with shortening. A couple years ago, I experimented with lard, because, a) why the hell not, b) animal fat never hurt anyone except maybe a few animals, and c) I figured that the original recipe back in the nineteenth century likely used lard. My first experiment used all lard, and no shortening. While these cookies tasted wonderful, the texture of the cookie suffered. After playing with the percentages, I discovered that a mix of half Crisco and half manteca gave the cookies the wonderful taste of murder, and the crispness of shortening. For those vegetarians out there, simply replace the lard with shortening and you will have the cookie that made my family happy for most of a century. It will be a smidge less tasty, yet still it will surpass all other cookies.

I find that the cookie tastes fine even without icing, but most people will want to ice the cookies. There are many fine icing recipes out there, but this is the one I use:

Melt:

6 tbsp butter

Add:

1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt

Gradually add:

1 lb. Confectioner's sugar
3 tbsp whole milk

If you burn the butter - heat until just turning brown - and use a bit more milk, it yields an interesting but yummy taste to the icing. Take small batches of the icing and add food coloring, or not. And of course, it's a lot easier to ice warm cookies.

These cookies freeze very well, and in fact taste great straight out of the freezer. They'll keep for months if you have the willpower to resist eating them. Which I don't. I usually make at least three batches to yield enough to give a few to coworkers, more to family, and to sate my inhuman hunger for cookies. Enjoy!

[wik] Mrs. Buckethead has pointed out that I overlooked an important aspect of the proper way to make these cookies. They are round. Any other shape detracts from the perfection of the cookie. The ancients understood this principle, but foolishly applied it to geometry and astronomy. The sole exception is to hand-shape one cookie into a letter for a loved one. And you only make one of these per loved one, the rest must be circular. It took several years of Mrs. Buckethead buying wonderful cookie cutters and me not using them before she grokked the essential soundness of my sublime understanding of the art and science of sugar cookie baking.

[alsø wik] I almost choked on my Diet Coke as a movie reference forced its way into my consciousness.

"You make these cookies in funny shapes?" "Well no, unless you think round is funny."