Best Sugar Cookie Recipe EVER
This is the BEST sugar cookie recipe– no chilling the dough, cookies keep their shape when baked, soft and flavorful, perfect for decorating.
Every year millions of people print this Best Sugar Cookie Recipe EVER from In Katrina’s Kitchen. I have been using this recipe for over 25 years, and it has never failed me.
The texture is medium-soft, but you can bake them longer if you prefer a crisp cookie. This cookie is my absolute favorite, and I have spent many years perfecting it for friends and family.
Why is This the BEST Sugar Cookie Recipe?
The dough comes together quickly with simple pantry ingredients.
It does NOT need to be chilled.
The recipe can be doubled easily.
Cookies hold their shape with very little expanding when baked.
Baked cookies freeze well.
The recipe I am giving you makes a large batch of dough because I like to bake many cookies. Also, I like to roll and cut my cookies fairly thick…to hold a lot of frosting.
Incorporating the last cup of flour may look dry and look crumbly. Turn out the dough onto your countertop and work with wet hands and/or more flour until the dough is smooth and ready to roll.
Most asked Q and A about this Recipe
Butter questions
- It is most important to note that the butter does not have to be at room temperature. We do not recommend rock-hard butter but allow the butter to sit on the countertop for 10-15 minutes while you assemble your ingredients.
- If you can press your finger into the butter and you can easily make a deep indent then the butter is too soft.
- You should be able to press the butter and make a small fingerprint.
- A tip for mixing butter is to cut it into cubes (or just small pats) before creaming with the sugar.
The dough is sticky and/or crumbly. What can I do?
- The final dough really comes together and has a texture close to Play-Doh. Wet your hands if you need to. Turn out the dough onto a floured surface. Don’t be afraid to use more flour and incorporate it in while you are “kneading” it into a smooth ball.
- Forget everything you know about sugar cookie dough. Don’t be afraid of sprinkling more flour as you roll it out. Use the scraps! Mix them back into the unused dough and keep going.
Can I chill the dough? I want to chill the dough. Actually, I need to make these 3 days in advance, is that okay?
- If you need to make the dough in advance, you can chill it. Wrap it tightly with plastic wrap and store it in the refrigerator.
- Bring the dough to room temperature before rolling and cutting. You may need to use more flour on the countertop.
The cookies look under-baked. Can I bake them longer?
- I almost always suggest pulling out these cookies and the 8-9 minute mark for large cookie cutters, and 6-8 minutes for small cookie cutters. They will continue baking on the cookie sheet for a few minutes while they cool and set.
- After cooling for about 5 minutes, I use a spatula to transfer them to a wire rack.
Can I omit the almond extract?
- You can omit the almond extract.
- If not using almond extract, replace it with an equal amount of pure vanilla extract.
- You can use any of your favorite flavorings in this cookie. I have used peppermint, maple, and lemon with great success.
How Do I Make these Cookies Gluten-Free?
- To make these the best gluten-free Sugar Cookie, swap out the flour for your favorite gluten-free 1:1 flour.
- I use King Arthur Flour Measure for Measure Flour
What is your favorite Christmas Cookie Frosting Recipe?
- I’m happy you asked! I like a soft, sweet frosting. Here is my favorite Christmas Cookie Frosting.
- Click here for my Small Batch Royal Icing recipe (it dries smooth and hard and is perfect for holding together gingerbread houses, too!).
- You could also try our Three Ingredient Chocolate Glaze
I hope you love this Best Sugar Cookie recipe as much as our family does! Merry Christmas!
Best Sugar Cookie Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 Cup unsalted butter, 226 grams
- 1 Cup granulated white sugar, 200 grams
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
- 1 egg
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3 cups all purpose flour, 360 grams
Instructions
- PREHEAT oven to 350° F.
- In the bowl of your mixer, CREAM butter and sugar until smooth, at least 3 minutes
- BEAT in extracts and egg. (PLEASE NOTE there is 1 egg in this recipe.)
- In a separate bowl, COMBINE baking powder and salt with flour and add a little at a time to the wet ingredients.
- IMPORTANT NOTE: If the dough looks crumbly keep mixing for 30 seconds to 1 minute longer. The dough should be pulling away from the sides of the mixer.
- If the dough still looks too dry or stiff for your mixer, turn out the dough onto a countertop surface, flour surface as needed. Wet your hands and finish off kneading the dough by hand.
- DO NOT CHILL THE DOUGH. Divide into workable batches (2-3 chunks), roll out onto a floured surface, and cut. You want these cookies to be on the thicker side (closer to 1/4 inch rather than 1/8).
- Bake at 350 for 6-8 minutes. Let cool on the cookie sheet until firm enough to transfer to a cooling rack.
Notes
Nutrition
Troubleshooting Best Sugar Cookie Recipe
Scooping and dumping your flour may be the problem! Even with level scooping measurements can vary. Try getting a digital kitchen scale and adding your ingredients by weight.
If your cookies seem to consistently need a longer or shorter baking time consider calibrating your oven with an oven thermometer.
Bake with a silicone mat or parchment paper.
Invest in a small metal cookie spatula to transfer cookies.
If left on the counter top for about an hour your butter should be the right consistency- a finger pressed onto the butter will make a slight indent but not sink down into it. (Read more about room temperature butter in this post about XL Bakery Style Cookies.)
Whenever a recipe calls for room temperature butter you should use room temperature eggs. To take the chill off of eggs I place them in a shallow bowl of warm (not hot) water for 2-3 minutes. You can then crack them for use in your recipe.
Looking for more Christmas Cookies?
Try my Christmas Cookie archive for some of the most adorable and delicious Christmas cookies.
Some of my favorites are Grinch Cookies and Ugly Christmas Sweater Sugar Cookie Bars.
For something different, try Christmas Tree Meringue Cookies.
2,506 Comments on “Best Sugar Cookie Recipe EVER”
These cookies where so easy and so good, I didn’t use any almond extract because I have none and they turned out perfect !!!
Thank you so much, my kids love it.
Thank you!
Anyone’s recipe not coming out as well as other’s? Be Patient! There many scientific reasons why dough doesn’t always come out the way you wanted. Ask yourself these questions first…
1. Is my oven correctly calibrated? It may actually be baking higher or lower than it’s telling you. Buy an oven safe thermometer and make sure it reads the same temp as your oven.
2. Fluff or sift your dry ingredients before measuring! Compacted flour measures differently than sifted flour so without recipes including weighed amounts, experience making the recipe a few times is usually the only real way you’re going to get it right every time.
3. Don’t let your dough get too warm! Dough should be cool to the touch the whole time, or else the butter starts melting and you finished product won’t work.
4. Do not overwork/over mix your dough! This builds up the gluten/proteins and you’ll have mis shapen or hard, cardboard like finished product.
5. Every time I hear “the cookies had no flavor,” or “boring and bland,” it’s usually because cut out sugar cookies are meant to be iced with roya icing, buttercream, sanding sugar, curds or jams. Since these toppings are so sweet, you don’t want an ultra sweet cookie dough.
6. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! You’ll ALWAYS get better at a recipe, each time you make it. If the majority of comments are great and there are just a few bad one’s, chances are it’s not the recipe. So don’t give up on a great recipe, try troubleshooting it and making it your own by playing with flavors. Taste the dough before you bake it and have fun! Food is made from love after all.
Mines came out perfect to the eye then I ate one 😛 they had a horrible bitter after taste. I’m. Im not sure what I did wrong. Any advice. Only change I made was using half white whole wheat flour (1.5c ) and the other half just regular white all purpous flour (1.5c) to equal the 3c callled for.
These cookies came together easily and held their shape but this recipe is missing a key ingredient: SALT!! Where is the salt?? It must be a mistake not to include it. Salt must be used to bring out the flavor and sweetness of these cookies (especially since the recipe calls for unsalted butter). I think they would be great with the addition of salt. There is just something missing without it. I’m disappointed I made a double batch and now have to re-do them. Please consider adding salt to the recipe!
I have made these several times and with this small adjustment they are AMAZING! I double the vanilla and triple the almond. These couldn’t get any better!
I was wondering if I could color the dough or would this change the consistency? I’m wanting to do red for Valentines cookies. Thanks
These came out amazing! I made exactly as stated- they were our Santa cookies this year. I have never had much luck with sugar cookies. Rolling them always led to frustration. These did not stick to anything and I didn’t have to use a ton of excess flour! The dough did smell very almond-y, but once they were baked, the taste was mild and made the cookies taste better than normal. They kept their shape perfectly. These were amazing! Thank you so much for the recipe. This will be our new recipe- i am truly happy to have a frustration free recipe!
The dough was very very dry. I had to wet my hands several times in order for the dough to become workable so it could be rolled out. It would make sense to incorporate a teaspoon or tablespoon of wailk into the recipe at the end. I ended up putting too much water on my hands when kneading the last batch and had to throw it out. Otherwise the cookies tasted great. Not too sweet so you can definitely add frosting and sprinkles without over-sweetening the cookies.
I made these yesterday and the dough was extremely sticky and even with added flour on the counter, rolling pin, and hands it stayed too sticky to roll out. I ended up chilling in the freezer for about 20 min which helped. The dough was still very soft which made it hard to transfer the cutout shapes to the baking sheet. They then spread out terribly when baked. ☹️ They do taste good but was disappointed that they didn’t hold their shape as promised. Would love to try again but want some pointers on what might have gone wrong. Thanks in advance.
These cookies are AMAZING. I made a test batch a couple weeks ago and dipped them in chocolate and they were so good it was scary. Now I’m making them for Christmas and will be icing them. I used fairly large cookie cutters and left them kind of thick and still got 55 cookies out of a doubled recipe.
They taste amazing with nothing on them, especially because I used vanilla bean paste. They’re sweet and delicious. I keep eating the ones that break.
Thank you for an awesome recipe. I can’t wait for my family to taste them.
Okay, I tried this recipe, and I do wonder if I didn’t make them quite thin enough. Mine were really soft and broke easily. Recommendations? Also, I do wish that all the contest comments could be removed so that the actual recipe reviews could be read more easily.
We just used this recipe to make cookies for Santa — great recipe! We loved that it didn’t have to be chilled, yet was still easy to roll out. I found the dough easy to transfer using an offset spatula. Thanks!
This is the ONE…. finally. 4 little girls had the best time rolling, cutting, re-rolling and then of course decorating. I appreciate all your helpful comments about how to handle the dough. The girls did get it to play-doh condition and had a great time doing it. The dough tastes great, the cookies even better.
I am tossing all my chill for 2 hrs before rolling out cookie recipes. Love love love. Thanks so much!
I haven’t made cut out Christmas cookies since I was in high school – I am now 61. Saw your recipe on the news app on my iPhone. You made it sound so easy, so I thought I’d give it a try. These are the best sugar cookies! I used my kitchenaid stand mixer and the dough came together perfectly. The dough was easy to work with – even the cookies cut from rerolled scraps looked good. I plan on icing the Christmas tree cookies tomorrow – though nothing fancy – just green tinted icing dusted with crunched up candy canes.
Thank you for sharing your recipe.
This was my first time making sugar cookies. And the title of the recipe is true. The BEST sugar cookies EVER for sure. They turned out perfect. Thank you for sharing!
I forgot to say.. I was AMAZED these don’t spread at all!! Good thing too, I took your word for it and didn’t space them out very far
This is floating around FB again. To be honest, I was muttering a LOT about this recipe when my kids were cutting out shapes and we couldn’t pick them up in one solid piece. But I started using a fork to scoop them up and by George it worked like a charm. I baked them for 6 minutes and realized after the fact that probably wasn’t long enough, they were still too soft. We’re going to try again today and bake them at least 8 minutes and roll the dough out a little thinner. This will be my go to for last minute sugar cookies for the no chill part! Thanks for sharing.
Love the cookie recipe its super easy to make and wow very tasty … love that they take hardly anytime to bake, I ended up making 3 batches and dipped one end in chocolate then parceled them as gifts for christmas… Thanks so much
These were so easy to make. I love not having to chill them, huge time saver! These didnt even make it to the frosting stage….my family devoured them!!!!
Just made these, turned out good! I am vegan so I substituted earth balance and a flax egg for the butter and egg and it came out fine. The dough was definitely falling apart so I ended up sticking with only 2 1/2 cups of flour and not 3 and they still baked really well 🙂
These cookies have excellent flavor & texture! However I had a very challenging time rolling them out. The dough kept cracking and splitting. Is this normal? Should I have wet me hands? Step by step pictures would be helpful to see dough consistency.
Hi! What adjustments should be made for high altitude?
This IS the very best sugar cookie recipe!!! I’ve tried many others. Awesome!!!!
This is seriously the best sugar cookie recipe. So easy to work with, rolls out perfectly with no sticking and no breaking apart.
You did not exaggerate, these are the easiest, best setting, Christmas sugar cookies I’ve ever made! Thank you !
Just baked your sugar cookie recipe with my daughter. The cookies actually kept their cut out shapes and they were delicious. We were very impressed. Thanks so much!
I just finished baking these cookies and unfortunately I found them to be very disappointing. They tasted very floury (if that is even a word) and for a sugar cookie didn’t seem quite sweet enough. Maybe the intention is to have them paired with a sweet icing but not on their own.
Made them with my Grandson Nicco.
Really easy nd they came out WONDERFUL
Thank you so much for this recipe! The cookies turned out perfect – no spreading, perfect consistency and great flavor – not too sweet (before all of the icing and sugar sprinkles!).
For those with crumbly dough, for sure the trick is wet hand and kneading the rest of the flour into the dough like you would bread dough. Oh, and no need to spray or grease pans – these came right off with a spatula and minimum effort after 5 minutes or so.
Love the sugar cookie Recipe. Will use again.
Are you able to roll and cut these cookies and then wrap and freeze until needed to bake?
This is the first time I’ve ever made cookies…. They came out great, but the bottom was a little burned…i used Pam spray… What else should I use next time to avoid the crispy bottoms???
Thanks
I would just put them on parchment paper. That’s what I did and they came off the pan perfectly.
Do you bring your butter to room temp first or use it cold and firm still? Thanks!
Hey Katrina! I stumbled upon your sugar cookie recipe (I honestly don’t know how I got out of culinary school without one) and I’m so glad I made your recipe! They are perfect. Thank you for making this recipe known to the world wide webs!
These are great cookies!! My husband is not a cookie person, but even he enjoyed these! The kiddos LOVED them too. I tried the original recipe and then I tried a twist, replacing the almond extract with 2 tsp of lemon extract and icing them with lemon icing. SUPER YUMMY!! Thanks for the great recipe!!
Our sugar cookie recipe has powered sugar. That is the only difference between yours and mine.
Completely outdated, but I just found this recipe and was hoping i could get advice for bake ahead, shelf life of these cookies. I need 6 dozen for a cookie exchange, so I was hoping to cook them the day before. How will the hold?
You can store these cookies wrapped in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks. You can also freeze them (unfrosted) up 2-3 months in advance. Bring them to room temperature before decorating.
I am from New Zealand and have just tried this recipe today. They are sooooooo yummy even without the icing! The recipe is going to be added to my recipe book. 😀
I’m not sure if I’m just doing something wrong, and I can’t really tell if anyone else has had any issues because the comments are all about your giveaway, however, I made these cookies going by the recipe and in my opinion they just tasted like flour. Suggestions? Anything?
Just wanted to know if you can substitute the sugar for splenda?
I have never baked with Splenda.
Yes and yes! I would say you’re safe to freeze baked cookies up to 1 month. I’ve never frozen the dough however I don’t see any reason you couldn’t as long as it’s wrapped tightly.
Can I freeze the dough and cook later? Also, can I freeze the cooked cookies and frost later (say like two weeks)?
I have made these sugar cookies twice, and they are the only recipe I have ever tried. They are so easy to work with and I love not having to chill the dough. I use Princess cake and cookie emulsion and they taste awesome. However, I have tried royal icing with two different recipes, was careful to have no grease on bowls or utensils, flavored it with clear vanilla (no oil)… And it won’t harden. It gets a gritty looking sheen after 12 hours or so, and little cracks where it pulls apart. I now wonder if it’s this cookie recipe… It would be great for a simple sugar topping or other frosting but do you have trouble with royal icing on these? What am I doing wrong?
Thank you for this recipe! The cookie holds it shape beautifully and it tastes fantastic!! Thank you!
Hi, How far in advance can these cookies be made? How should they be stored? I have a birthday party on the weekend and looking to get everything I can done prior to party day. Thanks!
I made these cookies this week. I had to bake them slightly longer, but they were fantastic. They really held their shape.
So I had to get up early to make these for an event, and they are totally worth it. I just tried one and they are now my favorite recipe for sugar cookies too. I love that they are easy enough to make even under the dangers of sleep deprivation. Thanks for sharing it.
I absolutely love this cookie recipe!! Every time I make it people demand more!!! Thank you for such an easy way to make a normally pain in the butt cookie 🙂
I made these today, I used dairy and soya free spread instead of butter and they are delicious! Thanks for the recipe 🙂
Just made these tonight. Love them, thank you so much for posting the recipe! will definitely be making more 🙂
When you updated the recipe to use smaller proportions, did you also change the recipe yield? (i.e. does this smaller recipe yield 3 dozen cookies?)
Everything is altered. However your cookie count may be different depending on what size cutters you use.