The most difficult and frustrating part of making homemade sugar cookies, however, is working with the dough. It can be complicated, even as an intermediate baker, to strike that balance between keeping the dough cold but warm enough to work with it. What’s a baker to do? Here’s my trick.
A Better Way to Roll Out Cookie Dough
Most people who make sugar cookie dough from scratch were taught to roll the dough out after it’s been chilled. The goal is to keep the butter in the dough cold which makes it easier to roll out. The only flaw in this technique is that the dough can be difficult to roll out once it’s been chilled and hardened. The natural response to working with this hard cold dough is to leave it out on your counter to soften before rolling it out, but sometimes you leave it out too long and your dough goes from hard and stiff to soft and sticky! There’s a better way: Roll the sugar dough out before you chill the dough, but do it between two pieces of parchment paper! The parchment paper acts like a sandwich, with the sugar cookie dough as the filling. Here’s how to do it: This technique not only saves time and struggle; it also allows you to keep intricate cookie shapes clean when cutting.
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