We are continuing with our Christmas in July theme here at This Bittersweet Life!

Decorating sugar cookies with your kids during the holidays is a fun family activity that results in a fun mess.  Think of atomic bomb of royal icing going off in your kitchen.  But sometimes you need that "wow factor."

Some of my fondest memories are making sugar cookies with my daughters when they were young.  You know, when Rudolph got a green nose instead of a red one or when the snowmen had three eyes. We have a collection of some really great vintage cookie cutters too, such as a scottie dog, a chicken, an entire set of card suits (my mom bought these and I don't know where she got them).  But I would pull out every cutter even if it wasn't a traditional Christmas shape.

I used a butter cookie recipe and while the taste was pretty good, getting the cookies to not spread was a tedious affair.  We had lots of misshapen Christmas cookies, so Rudolph's green nose and the snowman's three eyes didn't really matter in the end.      

As our family grew older, we enjoyed decorating Christmas cookies just as much but wanted ones that kept their shape and to make them pretty.  We wanted the pretty "grownup" sugar cookies without sacrificing taste.


Thanks to our addiction to Pinterest, and my addiction to all things cooking and baking (I have boxes and boxes of cookbooks yet to unpack) I found a sugar cookie recipe that claimed they wouldn't spread during baking.  During my searching, I also came across another post about how you should use European butter to keep your cutout cookies from spreading.  European butter has less water content than American butter and the water is part of what causes the cookies to spread.  So we of course used European butter when making our cookies.  (You can find European butters like KeriGold or Plugra in your local grocery store.)

I was already living with my mom and taking care of her.  It was her second to last Christmas when we decided to try this recipe.  In order to have a more controlled explosion in the kitchen, we opted to only cut out two shapes and we only made two two colors of icing--blue and white, so really we only colored one set of frosting.


I even got myself a fancy rolling pin that has different depth gauges so your dough is rolled out even and is never too thick or thin.  I was ready to make these cookies!

Unfortunately we were dealing with my mother's oven.  It was an electric from the mid to late 70s.  This oven was was nearly 40 years old but boy was it a trooper.  Just before that Thanksgiving one of the coils broke.  We really did not want to have to replace my mother's oven at the end of her life.  Plus it was built into a brick wall.  I was totally freaked out.  But our repair man did some digging to find a coil that would fit as the manufacturer no longer made that coil.  And bless his heart, he did!  After that, the oven became psychotic.

The psychosis of our oven related to temperature and while I had an oven thermometer to gauge what it really was, it would often change as much as 50 degrees whilst something was baking.  While cookies are more forgiving than cake, trying to make cookies that don't spread can be deadly in a 50 degree temperature change.  Needless to say, we watched closely while baking, adjusting the "temperature" or even propping the oven door open with a wooden spoon.  We had to be right there the whole time.


But in the end it was worth it!  We got perfectly shaped cookies ready to decorate.  In the end, my mother proclaimed that these sugar cookies were way to pretty to eat (though they did taste delicious). But I'll note that she said that about Rudolph with the green nose and the snowman with the three eyes.  That is was Omas are supposed to say.  But about these, she really meant it.

The following Christmas season we made only snowflakes as taking care of my mother became more time consuming.  But my brother came from Texas this Christmas so I still wanted something pretty.  This year we did light grey and white royal icing.  I have to say that the daughter far exceeded the mother in the skill set.  She decorated the cookies this year (the ones in all the photos for this post).  Perhaps I was patient enough and a good enough teacher.  My heart swells with pride!

We obviously didn't make any the holiday season we were "homeless."  My younger daughter's tiny galley kitchen in her apartment just wasn't suited for the atomic explosion of any of our holiday baking, much to the chagrin of my sister-in-law.  That year I got store-bought goodies.  Though I did bake something for my office.  My oldest daughter exclaimed how highly unfair that was and I just said, "Suck it up, Adrienne!"


The first holiday season in our new house we hosted 20 family members from my ex's side of the family for their annual family Christmas party--including my ex and his lovely wife. So of course we had to have a dessert smorgasbord, because what good was our new giant kitchen island if we didn't use it for our atomic holiday baking explosion?  We had everything from my daughter's easy chocolate truffles, to our family recipes of Austrian and German cookies, the family German cheesecake, fudge, chocolate dipped pumpkin cookies and of course the sugar cookies.  We even had a hot chocolate bar and made flavored chocolate stir spoons.

But after a year of not making the cookies, I forgot a step.  I was so mad that my brand new gas oven was making my cookies spread!  The spreading wasn't too bad, but I remember the very first ones we made in my mother's psychotic oven didn't spread at all.  No.  I was really mad because we finally perfected our macarons in that new oven and it should have worked like a charm on these sugar cookies!  Then my daughter kindly reminded me that rather than just putting the cut out cookies in the fridge to chill, we actually put them in the freezer.  They weren't frozen rock solid, but they had a good chill.  After that, cookie perfection returned to our kitchen!


In the end, our family really loved the beautiful sugar cookies.  My daughter's amazing icing skills of course put the cherry on top of the cake...I mean cookie!  The young ones really loved how special they looked and loved the taste.  I think we sent them all home with a few.  The adults all thought we should start our own bakery they were so professional looking.  But my daughter and I are not morning people.  So our own bakery is completely out of the question.

I'm really looking forward to making those cookies again this coming Christmas.  But this time, I won't forget to freeze my snowflakes.


Here is Sweetopia's sugar cookie recipe that we use to make our sugar cookies so you can make perfect cutout cookies too!  And be sure to check out her blog post on her Top 8 Tips on Preventing Cookies from Spreading.

Sylvia