Brittney Bragg > Rolled Halloween Sugar Cookies

                                             Recipe   
Ingredients:                                                            Yield: 5 dozen

Dough:

• 11/2 cups butter, softened
• 2 cups white sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 5 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. salt

Icing:

• Any cookie icing from a local grocery store.

Directions:

1. In large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight).
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
3. Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. Cool completely.

      
                                                             Making the Cookies

            For my first home study I decided to do sugar cookies, but sugar cookies for Halloween. I

figured it was going to be hard since I had never made homemade rolled out sugar cookies before, but

it turned out to be easy and super fun. First, I found a recipe and decided which cookie cutters I

wanted to do and took out the butter. I took out the butter a couple of hours before I started making

the dough, because for most cookies the butter needs to be at room temperature so you can cream in

into the other ingredients to create nice smooth cookies. After the butter was at room temperature I

 prepared the cookies just like the recipe directed: cream butter and sugar; beat in eggs and vanilla;

 stir in flour,  baking powder, and salt; then I placed it in the fridge over night. For sugar cookies the

dough HAS to stay cold to keep it easy to work with, because once the dough is warm it begins to

become sticky and will be very hard to roll out. So, when making these cookies I took out medium

sized portions of the dough at a time to keep the rest of the dough cold. After rolling the dough out

I sprinkled the tops of the cookies with sugar to give it a nice sugary crunch to the top, and then

placed the cookies in the oven and removed them from the pan to cool. I repeated these steps until all

of the cookies were baked. Once the cookies were all completely cooled I took decorated the cookies

with some cookie icing I got from the grocery store to make them look like Halloween cookies.   


                                                           Evaluating the Cookies

           After baking, cooling, and decorating the cookies it was time to evaluate them. Starting with

appearance: the cookies were really smooth on top with a light brown color around the edges of the

cookies and had a golden brown color on the bottom. The brown parts of the cookie not only give the

cookie an appealing look but it also gives the cookies more flavor and texture. For the texture part of

the evaluation: the cookies were very soft and had a lot of airy almost completely crumbly texture to

it. When it came to the texture I felt that this specific recipe and the time it had been in the oven

really played a major role in making the cookies smooth, soft, and chewy. The aroma part of these

cookies was a sweet almost caramel like scent, but it was a very balanced sweet smell: not too sweet

and not too less of an amount of sweet smell. When it came down to the actual taste of the cookie I

felt that this was the "perfect" sugar cookie. It had just the right amount of sweetness, not gooey but

not crunchy either , just the right amount of flavor from the browning in the oven and just a tad bit

of saltiness to contrast the sugar which really balanced out the cookies. The cookie it's self I thought

was really good although the cookie icing on top added almost too much sweetness to the cookie, but

other than the icing I liked the cookie. Overall, I think that these rolled out cookies were a success

and I would definitely try to make them again.