Once my Aunt and I had our White Chocolate Cherry Shortbread cookies (say that 3 times fast) all finished, we moved onto the cream cheese sugar cookies. While traditionally everyone bakes sugar cookies for Christmas, I thought adding in the cream cheese would be a fun twist.
These cookies were super easy and fun to make but I will warn you that the original recipe doesn’t yield very many cookies (only 12). We decided to triple it to make it worth our while. Be careful when you are doubling or tripling your ingredients. Some faulty math led to adding twice as much baking soda as needed (I won’t point fingers though, Laura). To avoid this, I like to write out the new quantity and cross out the old one so I don’t get confused.
Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies (courtesy of Allrecipes)
Ingredients
- 1 cup white sugar
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 3 ounces of cream cheese
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 egg yolk
- 2 ¼ cups flour
Method
Combine all ingredients except flour into mixer (we used a food processor).
Mix until combined.
Add in flour and mix until combined.
In tripling the recipe, we went way beyond the capacity of the food processor and had to use a wooden spoon to incorporate the rest of the flour. It was my exercise for the day.
Allow dough to chill in refrigerator overnight. We definitely cheated and only did 1 hour. Sorry, we had a time crunch people. They still tasted lovely.
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.
If you are interested in making any colored dough, at this point you can remove whatever portion you would like to dye and place it in a separate bowl.
Add in some food coloring and knead the color into dough until completely incorporated.
Note to self, next time wear gloves. My cuticles are still red from the dye. Maybe, I should reconsider eating something that permanently dyes my fingers. Nah, it makes things look too cute.
Once you have your dough colored, lightly flour a hard surface and place the dough on top of the flour for rolling. Take a floured rolling pin and roll out the dough to desired thickness (remember thicker cookies mean longer baking times).
We decided to use the red dough and plain dough to make candy canes. To create a candy cane, take a ½ inch section of plain dough and roll it into a snake. Then do the same to a similar sized section of the red dough.
Line up the two snakes next to each other to ensure that they are the same length and thickness. Remove any excess.
Gently squeeze the two sections together so they have some hold. Then gently twist the sections together until the whole thing is a one big twist.
Once the twist is complete, you can shape it into a candy cane or a wreath.
Another cool idea would be to dye a separate section of dough green. You could then braid the plain, red and green dough together to make a festive Christmas cookie.
We baked these for longer than recommended (recipe says 7-10 minutes). We did about 15 because of the thickness.
For the rest of the dough, we used tradition Christmas cookie cutters: a circle, a bell, a gingerbread man, and a tree. We also used (for the first time) a cookie cutter that you can write messages with from Williams-Sonoma (thanks for the wedding gift Rachael). We decided to write Merry Christmas (creative I know).
Because I was being lazy and I really don’t like royal icing, we decided to sprinkle the cookies before baking the cookies. This way they were already decorated when they came out.
Want to see how they all turned out?
Pretty cute, huh?
Which one is your favorite design? I’m pretty partial to the silver bells myself.
I definitely think this cookie will be a new Christmas tradition. A new twist to a great classic.
Follow our newlywed journey through love, laughter and happily ever after. I'm Mr. Adam's best friend, a wedding fanatic, a health food nut, a yoga fiend, an arts & crafts-ers, a DIY-er, a wannabe world traveller, a pinterest addict and a Jesus lover. I hope you enjoy our wedding/newlywed/travel/food/healthy living/crafting adventures.
