How to Make Christmas Sugar Cookies

I can not profess to be an expert in cookie making. Actually far from it, I didn't know a thing about it until I made those cookies and it was the first time ever in my life I've made cookies (laughing uncontrollablely while typing this). Hey. Laugh all you want. The cookies were praised by everyone who tasted them. That earned me confidence, or credentials in writing this blog, right? By popular demand, I've made the second batch using the same recipe afterwards. Cooking with recipes is alien to a person who was born and raised in China. We didn't have those measuring tools (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons...) in a Chinese kitchen. Following a recipe using the measuring tools took me back to my lab testing school days. I felt more like a scientist in a laboratory than a housewife in my home kitchen. Good thing about a recipe is that it has everything down to a science so you can do something completely new and nothing will go wrong with it as long as you follow the recipe. It's cooking for dummies. A dummy, I was when it came to cookie making. Notice I used "was", not "am" (LOL).

Below are all the ingredients you will need for the cookie making. I used all organic. You can find the organic ingredients in most of the grocery stores or you local farmer's markets. So my cookies are actually organic cookies. Why organic? Because if anyone tells you cookies are not good for you, you can argue with them your cookies are organic, and anything organic is good for you!

Dough Ingredients:
3 cups of white flour, plus more for dusting
1 cup of butter (2 sticks). Heat butter in microwave until melt
1 large egg
1 cup of white granular sugar, plus some red sugar for decorating (Add more sugar if you like sweet a lot. You need a lot of sugar to make anything taste sweet).
1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 and 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2 tablespoons half/half milk

Icing Ingredients:
1 tablespoon milk
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1 pound powdered sugar
food coloring

Instructions:

- Making the dough: Pull in all the ingredients in a large bowl, and mix well into dough. Wrap the dough with plastic or wax paper. Leave it in refrigerator to chill for at least 2 hours. Divide the dough into 4 parts. Roll out flat. Cut using cookie cutters into the cookie shapes of your desire. Remember to dust some white flour on the cutting surface and the top of the dough to avoid stickiness.

- Bake the cookies: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake the cookies in 10-12 minutes or as soon as the cookie edges start turning brown. Take out the baked cookies and flip them over. Let the baked cookies sit until hard and cold.

- Applying the icing: Mix all the icing ingredients well into thick liquid form. Apply icing evenly on the cookies according to your desired pattern. This is where your creativity shines. I colored the tree-shaped cookies with green icing, star-shaped cookies with red icing, and the stocking-shaped cookie with red and green stripes. I love how my simple stripe stocking-shaped cookie design turned out. Some more design ideas to consider: write the names of the people to whom you will give the cookies on the stocking-shaped cookies; add white icing on the tree-shaped cookies to make it like snow on the trees, and then dot different color M&M's to look like color ornaments.
- Spray red-color sugar on the cookies immediately after placing icing.

Here are a few photos of my cookie making process.