They're Vanilla, All Right: Sugar Cookies

I'm pretty sure I'm eventually going to bake my way through most -- if not all -- of Sarah Kieffer's 100 Cookies, so I'm making some of her recipes that I normally might not give a second thought. Like her sugar cookie recipe (the non-pan-banging one). I mean, I like a sugar cookie as much as anyone else, but aside from the addition of cream of tartar, there was nothing unusual or remarkable about the recipe.

 

To make the dough, you cream softened butter with sugar until light and fluffy; add an egg, egg yolk, and vanilla; and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt, and cream of tartar). You form the cookies (I used a #24 scoop and got 24 cookies from a batch) and roll each one in sugar before baking.

My cookies look pretty much exactly like the ones in the cookbook -- fairly pale, with dramatic cracks on top. They had a very nice texture -- chewy but somewhat light, with a crisp exterior. The flavor was vanilla. And I say that both to mean that they literally tasted like vanilla extract, and also that they weren't that interesting -- they seemed somewhat one-dimensional and a tad too sweet to me. These were perfectly good sugar cookies, but I don't think that I would make them again. And I haven't gotten around to trying Kieffer's pan-banging sugar cookie recipe yet, but I suspect that I will like that one better.

    

Recipe: "Sugar Cookies" from 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer.