This is truly the best sugar cookie recipe I’ve ever made. I got it when I did a cookbook for the pastry chef that created the recipe. I have been using it ever since. It’s soft and rich and has a slight orange flavor.
The cookbook I worked on was called “100 Best Decorated Cookies” by Julie Anne Hession.
It was a huge project! It really was 100 decorated cookies, BUT, they needed to be in steps, so each cookie style I made, I had to make about 8 times, in progression, so, essentially, we made 800 cookies. It took a month of 6 day weeks and 12 hour days.
If that wasn’t hard enough, we had to transport them to Las Vegas to shoot them there. I literally moved 800 cookies from my house in Salt Lake City to Las Vegas.
Each cookie style had its own cake box, to keep them separated and safe. Amazingly, they all fit in the back of my SUV. One hundred boxes!
When we arrived in Las Vegas, as we were transporting them from the car to the hotel we were staying in, a gust of wind grabbed about 8 boxes of the cookies and tossed them across the parking lot.
We watched as days of work broke all over the pavement.
Which, is why we booked a hotel with a kitchen, in case we had to do some more baking.
We had to stay up that night and re-make 8 different styles of cookies in steps, which was really 64 cookies.
The photo shoot took ten days. We shot it in our hotel room.
The cookies had to be shot in steps as well, so I had to remake each cookie again for camera.
This was honestly one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on, and I’ve worked on a lot of projects!
Okay, enough about the shoot, let’s talk about the cookies!
Everything about them is amazing. The dough is so good, I’m a dough eater. Sometimes I think I eat more dough than actually cookies.
They bake up so soft and stay soft for days.
The trick is to roll them out thick enough, a minimum of 1/4″, and to not over bake them.
Roll them out and cut them out with any fun cookie cutter you have and then decorate them with royal icing, yum!
| Servings | Prep Time |
| 4 dozen | 10 mins |
| Cook Time | Passive Time |
| 12 mins | 1 hour |
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This is truly the best sugar cookie recipe I've ever made. I got it when I did a cookbook for the pastry chef that created the recipe. I have been using it ever since. It's soft and rich and has a slight orange flavor.
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- 3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 1/4 cups unsalted butter at room temp
- 1 large egg
- 1 large egg yolk
- 3 tablespoons grated orange zest
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- In a medium bowl, whisk together flour and salt.
- In bowl of stand mixer, beat sugar and butter on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in egg, egg yolk, orange zest and vanilla until well combined.
- With the mixer on low speed, gradually add flour mixture to bowl, mixing until combined.
- Turn dough out onto a work surface and divide into three equal pieces. Shape each piece into a flat disk. Wrap each disk tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour, until cold, or for up to 3 days.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F, placing racks in the upper and lower thirds.
- On a lightly floured work surface, roll out one disk of dough to a thickness of ¼ inch. Using cookie cutter, cut out shapes and carefully transfer them to 2 prepared cookie sheets, spacing them about 1 inch apart. Reroll scraps as necessary. Repeat process with more dough until both cookie sheets are full.
- Bake for 11 – 15 minutes, switching positions of cookie sheets halfway through, until cookies are set and very lightly browned. Let cookies cool on cookie sheet for 10 minutes, then carefully transfer them to wire racks to cool completely before decorating.
- Repeat steps 6 and 7 with the remaining dough.
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