If you come around these parts much at all, you know how much I adore cut-out sugar cookies, and how much I enjoy decorating them with royal icing. I sure do, but I can also really appreciate the goodness of a straight up classic sugar cookie. They should be golden, somewhere between puffy and chewy, and definitely on the large side. When I flipped across the recipe title “Sugar Saucers” in The Pastry Queen cookbook I thought, perfect! But then I read the recipe and I was totally turned off. This recipe uses part butter (yay!) and part vegetable oil (ick) for the fat. I can handle veggie oil in some cake batters but it just seemed wrong to me in a cookie, so I skipped them. I put the idea aside for awhile and eventually I thought, what the heck, I’ll give them a shot. I must say I was very pleasantly surprised with the end result and I’m not sure I have enjoyed a plain sugar cookie this much before. The texture was perfect – a delicate sugar-sprinkled crust on the outside that gives way to a soft, chewy interior. Of course now I’m very curious to try the same recipe with butter in place of the oil just for the sake of comparison, and I’ll be sure to update with my results when I do.
