teacup & cupcake sugar cookies

Like most students, I get a lot accomplished during finals week. Although the tasks accomplished tend to be anything I picked up while procrastinating. Instead of buckling down and studying or writing a paper before the deadline, I'm shopping for holiday gifts, cleaning up my apartment, and of course- baking!

It just so happens that my work had its holiday party this week, during finals, so I had to bring in a dessert for the potluck party. Because my office is mixed with Jewish and Christian celebrators, I didn't want to make Christmas cookies that were shaped like Santa or trees. So I went to Michaels and picked up some cookie cutters that were cute -teacups, teapots, and cupcake shapes- and decorated them with green and red icing. Here's the allrecipes.com recipe that I found for the sugar cookies:

INGREDIENTS: 

1 1/2 cups butter, softened 

2 cups white sugar 

4 eggs 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

5 cups all-purpose flour 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1 teaspoon salt 

DIRECTIONS: 

1. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in  eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Cover, and  chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight). 

2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). 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.

This recipe was so easy! I made the dough around 11:00 am, went to a final, and came back home around 5:30 pm and the dough was chilled perfectly. It wouldn't have been very hard to make homemade icing, but I didn't want to buy all the food coloring that I probably wouldn't use again until next year. Therefore, I just bought tubes of icing that you can squeeze right out onto the cookie.

After applying the icing, I put all the cookies on a cookie sheet, uncovered, into the oven overnight. Don't turn on the oven! Just keep them there. By the morning, the icing had hardened just enough where it wouldn't get messed up during the transportation of the cookies. And let me just say, they were absolutely delicious! Perfect sugar cookies! Many thanks to my awesome KitchenAide Mr. Mixer!