Making sugar cookies is a classic Christmastime activity, but you can do so much more with them than just roll, cut, and blanket them with royal icing! From thumbprints to pinwheels to custom panes of candy stained glass, the versatility of this dough is endless. Make yourself a few batches and get your sugar cookie on this holiday season! Here’s some inspiration from my archives.
Iced Sugar Cookies {Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies with Quick-Dry Royal Icing}
A Christmas staple! These buttery roll-out sugar cookies come with a time commitment, but they sure are fun to make (and eat!). All my sugar cookie knowledge is in that post, so click over and check it out!
Hand-Painted Sugar Cookies {Kid-Friendly Cookie Decorating}
Not up for giving bags of sugar-based concrete to the kids in your life? Paint your sugar cookies instead! Using a simple mixture of sweetened condensed milk and food coloring, you can make your sugar cookies as festive as you want with much less fuss. Finishing them with some basic icing is totally optional, but I think it makes them really cute.
Want to skip decorating altogether? Make Stained Glass Cookies! Cut out the center of the cookies before they go in the oven, then fill them with crushed hard candy. In just minutes, it’ll melt into a little candy stained glass window.
Here’s where things get interesting. The very same dough that makes for the best sugar cookies gets rolled into balls instead of sheets, then filled with little wells of festive icing! So cute, right?! Good luck eating just one.
Candy Cane Cookies use the same sugar cookie dough base with three adjustments: less baking powder, the addition of peppermint extract, and half the dough is dyed Christmas red! Oh, and they’re rolled and baked into *the* cutest candy canes you ever did see.
I spent years being intimidated by pinwheel cookies, but it turns out they’re kind of a snap to make! You need patience for the stacking and rolling, but after that they’re just an extra-festive slice and bake recipe.
What’s your favorite sugar cookie recipe? Let me know in the comments or on social media!
A few years ago, I posted a question on social media asking for Christmas cookie recommendations. Since I grew up largely without homemade Christmas treats, holiday baking was a bit of a mystery to me. Since then, I’ve spent the holidays steadily working my way through the (very) long list supplied by various Facebook friends. Those classics have been interspersed with other festive treats, of course, but I work my way through that list a little more each holiday season. Over the years, there have been 
I found these twisty two-tone vanilla-mint cookies super intimidating. I have pretty sad motor skills and was afraid I didn’t have a dough in my arsenal that wouldn’t spread out and get weird. As usual though, I shouldn’t have been concerned.*
My Candy Cane Cookies are totally adorable, delicious, and festive as all get-out! The dough I use here is a slight variation on the one I use for my 
This dough gets a three hour chill before it’s formed into cookies. A tablespoon of each color of dough is rolled into a rope.
They’re twisted together and smoothed before being formed into candy cane shapes.
If you want your cookies to have a more “arts & crafts” look, you can skip the smoothing step. Your cookies will be a little shorter and chunkier, but just as delicious as their more realistic-looking counterparts.
The formed cookies each get a brush of egg white glaze before baking. This gives them a little sheen post-baking, and also allows you to decorate with holiday sprinkles and sparkling sugar. Cute, right?!
Candy Cane Cookies expand a tiny bit while baking, but only enough to hide any imperfections incurred during the shaping process. I kind of like that they’re not all carbon copies of each other though.
I’m also a big fan of their crisp edges, soft centers, and buttery mint flavor. Add in their hefty dose of holiday cheer and…well, what’s not to love? ❤ 
e2 bakes brooklyn 