Sugar Cookies
For my first Christmas post this year (I know, it’s kind of late!), I decided to tackle sugar cookies, a holiday baking favorite. I find many sugar cookies to be either tough and flavorless or too crumbly and sweet but this year I found a wonderful sugar cookie recipe in my favorite holiday cookbook, Feast by Nigella Lawson. You can find the recipe here and I would highly recommend trying it as it yields cookies that are flavorful, but not overly sweet and crunchy without being hard. The cookies form this recipe also held their shape well, which is very important if you want to decorate the cookies after they bake.
Although I enjoy holiday baking, I know that December is a very busy time of year and many people do not want to be stuck in the kitchen baking for hours yet still want the fun experience of decorating cookies with family. In deference to those non-baking enthusiasts, I decided to compare my new favorite sugar cookie recipe to a tube of Pillsbury sugar cookie dough. This versatile dough, found in the refrigerator section of the grocery store, comes in a log shape that can either be sliced in rounds or rolled out and cut into shapes before baking. Since I wanted sugar cookies appropriate for decorating, I took the latter approach and was rather disappointed with the results. The dough spread out so badly that the shapes were nearly unrecognizable and the cookies were extremely sweet. After being decorated with icing and sprinkles, the Pillsbury cookies were almost too sweet to eat and the sugar really drowned out any other flavors there might have been in the dough. The homemade cookies held their shape much better and the vanilla flavor came through well, even after they were frosted. The only attraction I can see to the Pillsbury dough is that it saves time. There is no need to mix ingredients together or chill the dough, as required with homemade sugar cookies. The Pillsbury dough, therefore, shaves about an hour and 15 minutes off the time it takes to make a batch of sugar cookies, but most of this is the refrigeration time, which isn’t an active step anyway.
Bottom Line: Using pre-mixed, refrigerated dough will save you more than an hour when making sugar cookies but the results aren’t very appetizing. The cookies made from the Pillsbury dough were overly sweet and so soft that they didn’t hold their shape, making them almost impossible to decorate. Homemade cookies, made from the recipe I linked to, had much better flavor, texture and appearance and were worth the extra time required.
Nigella’s Cut-Out Cookies                                                     Pillsbury Sugar Cookies
Cost: $1.00 Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Cost: $1.98
Time: 1 hour and 40 minutes                                                         Time: 25 minutes