Sugar Cookies

So something you should know about us: we love theatre. This past summer we participated in a group who put on a show and donated all proceeds to a local charity. Not only did the money from the ticket sales go to charity, we also did 2 car washes and a bunch of bakesales, which are, of course, our favorite fundraiser!
For the first bake sale, we baked together for the first time and we made simple sugar cookies, which sold like crazy!

Comedy Tragedy Masks & The flower represents the charity we donated to

The icing on the cookies is royal icing. But not really, its actually just powdered sugar and water and food coloring.
The great thing about these cookies is just by decorating them differently they can be for a bunch of different events:

Leaf cookies for the local community garden event

 or...

Balloons for a birthday

or...

Add sprinkles! (Great if you're babysitting...)

 Sugar Cookies
from America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book

Ingredients:
2 cups Sugar
2 1/2 cups All Purpose Flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
pinch salt
1 3/4 sticks unsalted butter (softened
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 eggs 


What to Do:
1.  Whisk flour, baking powder and salt together
2. Beat butter and 1 1/2 cups of the sugar together with an electric mixer until fluffy 
3. Put vanilla and eggs into the butter mixture
4. Add flour mixture until combined
5. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and prepare baking pan
6. Roll dough into balls 
7. If you don't plan on icing them, roll each ball in the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar, if you do plan on icing them you can skip this step
8.  Place on the baking sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes rotating half way
9. Let them cool for 10 minutes
10. EAT THEM! (but only if they are intended for you to eat, if they are a gift, do NOT eat them) 

for Royal Icing, just mix powdered sugar with water until you get the consistency you need (for outlining it should be thicker, filling in, thinner). Maybe when we get better at it we will do a post on how to ice your cookies, but for now experiment, that's the funnest way to learn!


Just as a side note, the bake sales this summer helped us make at least 100 dollars per sale and we had three (this is a lot for a bake sale) and in total we raised 16000 dollars for the local charity.