I needed a quick recipe for a St. Patrick's Day get together and decided to try Carole Walter's recipe for "Super Sugar Sparkles" from Great Cookies. They are just vanilla butter cookies coated in sugar, but I figured that if I used green sugar, the cookies would be perfectly appropriate for the holiday.
The recipe is straightforward. You cream butter with sugar; add egg yolks and vanilla; and alternately mix in the sifted dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking soda, cream of tartar) and milk. You can use the dough immediately and it was easy to handle. You form the dough into balls, flatten each cookie into a disk, brush it with thinned egg white, and sprinkle on sugar before baking. I had some fine green sugar on hand, so I used that instead of sanding or coarse sugar. Walter describes these as "monster sugar cookies" that are each made with one-quarter cup of dough and end up five inches in diameter. I wanted my cookies to be more manageable, so I used a #24 scoop to portion out the dough and I ended up with 20 cookies per batch.
I flattened the cookies by pressing down on them with my hand, which is why in the photo above you can see the imprint from my fingers on the top of each cookie. I should have used a glass to flatten the cookies as the recipe specifies. To be honest, I wasn't reading the recipe carefully and didn't catch that it instructs you to flatten the dough in two stages -- first with the heel of your hand and then with the bottom of a glass. If I had used a glass, I think the cookies would have looked better (no ridges) and also had a better consistency; my cookies were just a touch on the cakey side. Still, they were pretty good. They tasted like supermarket sugar cookies -- and I'm not using that as an insult here. I also think that coarse sugar would have been preferable to fine sugar, as it would have provided more crunch.
Still, this is a totally decent cookie that requires very little effort. And, of course, you can dress it up any way you like with different colored sugars. I don't think I would make them again, but I still consider them a success.
Recipe: "Super Sugar Sparkles" from Great Cookies by Carole Walter.
Previous Posts:
The recipe is straightforward. You cream butter with sugar; add egg yolks and vanilla; and alternately mix in the sifted dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking soda, cream of tartar) and milk. You can use the dough immediately and it was easy to handle. You form the dough into balls, flatten each cookie into a disk, brush it with thinned egg white, and sprinkle on sugar before baking. I had some fine green sugar on hand, so I used that instead of sanding or coarse sugar. Walter describes these as "monster sugar cookies" that are each made with one-quarter cup of dough and end up five inches in diameter. I wanted my cookies to be more manageable, so I used a #24 scoop to portion out the dough and I ended up with 20 cookies per batch.
Still, this is a totally decent cookie that requires very little effort. And, of course, you can dress it up any way you like with different colored sugars. I don't think I would make them again, but I still consider them a success.
Recipe: "Super Sugar Sparkles" from Great Cookies by Carole Walter.
Previous Posts:
- "Pearls Make a Gem of a Cookie: Vanilla Polka Dots," November 19, 2016.
- "Sprinkles Are Nothing to Celebrate: Birthday Cake Cookies," January 14, 2015.
- "Like a Snickerdoodle in New Clothes: Giant Chewy Lemon Sugar Cookies," May 27, 2011.
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