Favourite Holiday Sugar Cookies

These holiday sugar cookies are the recipe to print, laminate, and tape inside the kitchen cabinet for every December cookie-decorating session. The dough is built on standard pantry players, butter, sugar, egg, flour, baking powder, with one secret addition: a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon. Just enough to add quiet warmth without making the cookies taste like snickerdoodles.

The two-hour fridge chill is what separates these from a flat, spreading cookie. Cold butter holds its shape in the oven, so the cute reindeer and snowflakes you cut out actually look like reindeer and snowflakes once baked. Skip the chill and they spread into amorphous blobs.

Keep most of the dough in the refrigerator while you work in small batches. Roll, cut, decorate, bake. Then pull out the next portion. Warm dough on a warm counter is the enemy of a sharp-edged sugar cookie.

Pro Tips

• Roll between two sheets of parchment dusted lightly with flour. This keeps the dough from sticking and you can lift the parchment to peel away cookie cutters cleanly.
• Watch the edges, not the centers. The cookies are done when the rims just turn pale gold, even if the middles look soft. They firm up as they cool.
• For thicker, softer cookies, roll to a full quarter inch. For crisp, snappy cookies, roll closer to an eighth of an inch and watch the bake closely as they cook even faster.
• Decorate with sprinkles before baking, or wait until cooled and pipe with royal icing. Pre-bake sprinkles bond to the cookie surface; post-bake icing gives a smoother, more decorative finish.

Variations

• Swap cinnamon for a quarter teaspoon of cardamom for a Scandinavian-style holiday cookie.
• Brush warm cookies with a thin lemon glaze for a bright, citrusy finish that cuts through the buttery sweetness.
• Roll the dough into a log instead of cutting shapes for icebox-style cookies that slice and bake in minutes.